"My question earlier, which no one seems to want to address is why are Jews hated so deeply throughout the world by non Muslims?"

Excellent question, and one which I though I have tried to address.

Perhaps it has been in part to the success of Jews throughout history, their above average numbers in banking finance, legal system, academia and certianly in politics.

It is interesting to note the inordinate number of Jews involved in "progressive" as well as socialist movements.

Many are jealous of anyone who is successful. Many don't like other preaching to them. I am proud of Jewish success and scientific and other major contributions to mankind. With regards to socialism, marxism, communisim, I certianly believe the intentions are well meaning but in my view misguided.

I think their forefront in many of these areas have made Jews, us, who are different than Christians, Muslims easy to spot and apparently the objects of scapegoating.

I even hate to say it but I find my own fellow liberal Jews who get on cable and tell us it is *our responsibility* as a wealthy free strong nation to stop the bloodshed in Libya like one guy yesterday. Oh really? It is now our responsibility to be the world' policemen and emergency medical personel?

Who says? You? I find it insulting annoying and condescending. And unfortunately all liberals annoy me this way. Yet many in the forefront are Jewish. I say to them you want to send your children in harms way, you want to spend your hard earned money to free and save the world go ahead but do not tell the resto of America it is OUR duty to do so.

I don't know if this helps.

But sometimes I wish my fellow liberal Jews would just shut up and stop telling other people what they must do.

My personal standard is to be a law abiding honest human being. I believe in the golden rule. I honr those who want to be kind or charitable. But that is their choice.

Per your request, I watched this morning; or at least two thirds of it. I don't have the time for the full video and it seems a bit redundant. I am usually not a fan of small snippets of quotes taken from various individuals and various times tomake a story. Nor do I know who are the speakers; although regardless of who they are, what they say is vile and wrong.

It's kind of relevant that they are most all imams/religious scholars. One being Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who addressed cheering throngs of Egyptians post-Mubarak.

It is disturbing, but not entirely surprising. Muslims in the Middle East blindly hate Jews.

As do muslims in asia, africa, europe, australia, the americas. Don't forget those.

I doubt if this comes as a surprise to anyone.

Would it surprise someone who has asserted that the jihad against Israel would stop if the "palestinians" were just treated better?

My question earlier, which no one seems to want to address is why are Jews hated so deeply throughout the world by non Muslims?

By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ I recently completed a tour of Norwegian universities, where I spoke about international law as applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the tour nearly never happened.

Its sponsor, a Norwegian pro-Israel group, offered to have me lecture without any charge to the three major universities. Norwegian universities generally jump at any opportunity to invite lecturers from elsewhere. When my Harvard colleague Stephen Walt, co-author of "The Israel Lobby," came to Norway, he was immediately invited to present a lecture at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Likewise with Ilan Pappe, a demonizer of Israel who teaches at Oxford.

My hosts expected, therefore, that their offer to have me present a different academic perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would be eagerly accepted. I have written half a dozen books on the subject presenting a centrist view in support of the two-state solution. But the universities refused.

The dean of the law faculty at Bergen University said he would be "honored" to have me present a lecture "on the O.J. Simpson case," as long as I was willing to promise not to mention Israel. An administrator at the Trondheim school said that Israel was too "controversial."

The University of Oslo simply said "no" without offering an excuse. That led one journalist to wonder whether the Norwegian universities believe that I am "not entirely house-trained."

Only once before have I been prevented from lecturing at universities in a country. The other country was Apartheid South Africa.

Despite the faculties' refusals to invite me, I delivered three lectures to packed auditoriums at the invitation of student groups. I received sustained applause both before and after the talks.

It was then that I realized why all this happened. At all of the Norwegian universities, there have been efforts to enact academic and cultural boycotts of Jewish Israeli academics. This boycott is directed against Israel's "occupation" of Palestinian land—but the occupation that the boycott supporters have in mind is not of the West Bank but rather of Israel itself. Here is the first line of their petition: "Since 1948 the state of Israel has occupied Palestinian land . . ."

The administrations of the universities have refused to go along with this form of collective punishment of all Israeli academics, so the formal demand for a boycott failed. But in practice it exists. Jewish pro-Israel speakers are subject to a de facto boycott.

The first boycott signatory was Trond Adresen, a professor at Trondheim. About Jews, he has written: "There is something immensely self-satisfied and self-centered at the tribal mentality that is so prevalent among Jews. . . . [They] as a whole, are characterized by this mentality. . . . It is no less legitimate to say such a thing about Jews in 2008-2009 than it was to make the same point about the Germans around 1938."

This line of talk—directed at Jews, not Israel—is apparently acceptable among many in Norway's elite. Consider former Prime Minister Kare Willock's reaction to President Obama's selection of Rahm Emanuel as his first chief of staff: "It does not look too promising, he has chosen a chief of staff who is Jewish." Mr. Willock didn't know anything about Mr. Emanuel's views—he based his criticism on the sole fact that Mr. Emanuel is a Jew. Perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer than 1,000 Jews live in Norway today.

The country's foreign minister recently wrote an article justifying his contacts with Hamas. He said that the essential philosophy of Norway is "dialogue." That dialogue, it turns out, is one-sided. Hamas and its supporters are invited into the dialogue, but supporters of Israel are excluded by an implicit, yet very real, boycott against pro-Israel views.

Mr. Dershowitz is a law professor at Harvard. His latest novel is "The Trials of Zion" (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).

I appreciate my time on this forum I received exponetionally more from it than I gave. I am sort of returning to the board but I will probably only be posting interesting articles mos in the power of the word thread. I apologize in advance but I probably won't be posting much my own writing. This is because of my time constraints not because I am angry or upset. Even if I became Glenn Beck's Number One Fan I won't have a lot of time to post on the forum. I have a new job (again) that is keeping me very busy.

I m not going pretend that I didn't get upset and leave because that is what happened. However, I had been thinking about quitting theboard for a while because of the time commitment.

I want to clarify a few things ---I'm sorry I am not particularly interested in discussing it further. If you believe that is because I am incapable of defending my thoughts--- the evidence certainly fits. Please feel free to have the last word.

I don't like either Glenn Beck or George Soros. I think Glenn Beck has a better record on Israel than George Soros. I don't think Glenn Beckis an anti-Semite. However I found Glenn Beck's comment on George Soros's Holocaust activities very upsetting and insulting to all Holocaust victims. I can see that not making any sense to some and I am lacking the ability to explain it.

I have no tolerance at all for Democrats or Republicans who use Holocaust analogies to make other unrelated political points or those who criticize those who were murdered and therefore are unable to defend themselves. To be clear I generally think any Holocaust analogy is an insult to Holocaust victims because it trivializes their suffering. My thinking it obviously doesn't make it true and not all Jews agree with me but don't expect me to respond well if you make a Holocaust analogy.

Liberal Jews who support Israel should stop and contemplate who your true friends really are. You might roll your eyes at Sarah Palin and her kind, but we are the one demographic that would readily pick up a rifle and go toe to toe with those that chant "Khaybar Khaybar ya Yahud, jaysh Muḥammad sayaud"on your behalf.

Take a hard look at the leftist values taught to you in academia and compare them to your Jewish values. Notice some profound contradictions there? So what are your values?

I almost always read what you post in "Word" even though I'm about as kosher as a bacon double cheeseburger. Why? Because there is some very good stuff there that transcends the theological divisions between judiasm and christianity. Wisdom is wisdom, truth is truth.

I would add to this discussion there were many people "as kosher as a bacon double cheeseburger" such as my father and his friends who went to Europe and fought Hitler ending that chapter in history, obviously many of those were lives lost and injured due to what happened under Nazi rule and the process of stopping it. We call them heroes, but mostly we forget and we forgot what they did. I would just add that in my opinion they are all victims, in different ways, of the atrocities of that era.

I don't know how much influence Soros had in all that is going on in the Middle East using his denial of being a "puppit master" his terminolgy. It is interesting he used this term as a Mickey Mouse puppit was thrown at me while Katherine and I were stuck on a highway while moving from Fla. to NJ some years back by the group of people who have been stealing all her music lyrics. I find it odd Soros himself would use this adjective if he were *not* a puppit master. In any case it is hard to know what is going on behind scenes. Beck is in my view doing a service trying to connect dots. I have learned not to underestimate the power of wealthy people who certainly *can* manipulate average people easier than I ever imagined. One thing does seem certain and that is what we see in the Middle East is exactly as Soros has been hoping for for many years. It is as he calls it the Jewish Right that is the problem. Isn't it interesting that this survivor of the Holocaust is himself now blaming some Jews for what it the main problem in the Middle East??

See Soros below: "Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks"

Oh really?

****February 03, 2011

Soros: 'The Main Stumbling Block Is Israel'

President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States - Syria and Iran - than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.

The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.****

As for Beck I have mixed feelings about him. I watched his show for a few minutes yesterday when he had the 12 yr old Asperger's boy who is a mathematical genius on his show. There is just something about Beck - he is just so goofy. I can't watch him for more then a few minutes.

Rachel,Welcome back.Your point is an excellent one and ultimately you are right.

Although not exactly in reference to Holocaust analogies in a somewhat parallel argument I remember seeing Elie Weisel speak in WPB in the 90s and he spoke about how a whole holocaust "industry" exists and while in some ways it functions as a means be which we remember what happened there is still something perverse about some aspects of it. The idea of an "industry" feeding off this corner of history?

I don't know how much influence Soros had in all that is going on in the Middle East using his denial of being a "puppit master" his terminolgy. It is interesting he used this term as a Mickey Mouse puppit was thrown at me while Katherine and I were stuck on a highway while moving from Fla. to NJ some years back by the group of people who have been stealing all her music lyrics. I find it odd Soros himself would use this adjective if he were *not* a puppit master. In any case it is hard to know what is going on behind scenes. Beck is in my view doing a service trying to connect dots. I have learned not to underestimate the power of wealthy people who certainly *can* manipulate average people easier than I ever imagined. One thing does seem certain and that is what we see in the Middle East is exactly as Soros has been hoping for for many years. It is as he calls it the Jewish Right that is the problem. Isn't it interesting that this survivor of the Holocaust is himself now blaming some Jews for what it the main problem in the Middle East??

See Soros below: "Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks"

Oh really?

****February 03, 2011

Soros: 'The Main Stumbling Block Is Israel'

President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States - Syria and Iran - than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.

The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.****

As for Beck I have mixed feelings about him. I watched his show for a few minutes yesterday when he had the 12 yr old Asperger's boy who is a mathematical genius on his show. There is just something about Beck - he is just so goofy. I can't watch him for more then a few minutes.

ever wondered why sun tzu said, give a surrounded enemy a way out ? What I see in the midst of this conflict, that drives the majority of the so called global geopolitical sphere is an incredibly hotblooded minority, with burdens of history that little other Western countries can compare, cornered, nay, squelched between two pillars, without a way out, fighting to the death. And some of you guys want to tighten the squeeze.....It should be noted that the Arab states were hardly ever united before our century. They were constantly disputing over territories, oil revenues, clean water, etc. But lately, one thing has united them: the destruction of the state of Israel, and Iran is apparently the leader.

Andrew, you are a bright, well-educated thoughtful guy with a good heart. Like all of us, you are also the result of the air which you breathe, which in the case of Europe has reverted to its traditional anti-semitism, which is compounded in many areas by its pre-emptive dhimmitude towards the Muslims in its midst. As you know, I have been to Europe and I have seen iaccuracies and attitudes in the press there that leave me looking like a Jewish Don King (the black American boxing promoter with the hair that goes straight up).

I'm not seeing a source for the maps you cite which I suspect draw things in a way that is subject to dispute, but the larger point is to expand the area in question. Once we do this we see that it is, and I say this with love, wildly deranged to see the Palestinians as surrounded! There IS a Palestinian homeland-- it is called Jordan. The West Bank used to be part of Jordan, but because of Arafat and PLO perfidy, they fg abandoned it.

Mein Kampf was a best-seller throughout the Arab word (Under the name "My Jihad" if I am not mistaken) in the 1930s, well before WW2 and Hitler's final solution. Jews have been the majority population of Jerusalem since 1500, and due to Islamic oppression (dhimmitude) nearly as many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries as did from Europe.

It is the Jews who are surrounded and who have had to fight for their very lives against Arab onslaught many times and who haved lived for decades with their women and children specifically targeted by suicidal killers (whose families were paid $25,000 a hit by Saddam Hussein by the way). Despite this, Israeli Arabs are citizens who vote and can bring lawsuits (which they sometimes win) have their mosques and their religion. Find me this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc!

Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!

Since my note has flown in a bit of a different direction, let me explain some stuff further.

a)There IS a Palestinian homeland-- it is called Jordan. The West Bank used to be part of Jordan, but because of Arafat and PLO perfidy, they fg abandoned it.

Here I am afraid, things are a bit more complicated. Jordan, is NOT palestinian homeland. When shuffling with historicisms, one has to be careful. Palestinian people, means something else than Palestinian descent, and Palestinian state. Most Arabic speaking Palestinians are of the Levantian descent with origins from Palestine, Israel, Gaza and West Bank. The Palestinians from Jordan, are part of the big Palestinian diaspora, a consequence of a bigger wave of exodus of peoples of Arabic descent (and of course Christians) in 19.century, under the oppression of the Ottoman rule and NOT only the wars in 48, and 67 as most people think.

It holds true however, that around 60% of Jordanian nationals are of Palestinian descent (again, do not mix with Palestinian people, Palestinians, because it is not the same stuff etc.) and have the biggest diaspora percentage. Palestinians have mostly Mediterranean genetic ancestry, and represent the descendants of ethnic groups that lived in the area since at leat 1.5 millenia ago. The descendants „accepted“ the muslim culture only after the the Muslim golden age, their conquests in the 6th and 7th century. The question of distinct national identity I will leave out of this debate since it is gravely debated area even as we speak. What holds ground thought, that the start of the national identity in both cases, started only in the 19.century, as with most other countries in the world. The first popular use of endonym "Palestinian" as a concept of a nation of the Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine began just before Franz Ferdinand was shot i.e. WW1.

Seek Civantos, Ignacio Klich, Geoff Lesser and even Helen Shiblak (Jewish scholar) for high level expert research on the topic.

b)Mein Kampf was a best-seller throughout the Arab word (Under the name "My Jihad" if I am not mistaken) in the 1930s, well before WW2 and Hitler's final solution. Jews have been the majority population of Jerusalem since 1500, and due to Islamic oppression (dhimmitude) nearly as many Jews emmigrated to Israel from Arab countries as did from Europe.

I do not understand the Adolf comment, hence I will rather not comment it. I will however tackle the majority pop numbers. First of all, any and all population data pre-1900 is based on guesswork at best,from travellers, merchant diaries, organisations...etc. One of the only primary sources on the topic is the so called Ottoman Tahrir Defter (think of it as a tax census book). If you specifically need sources, you can check the „Turkish tax register, Jewish history timeline“ for exact numbers, but for the year 1553, the estimated number of Jews is 2 thousand, and Muslims 12 thousand (for Jerusalem only). Only in the second half of 19.century the numbers are placed on a more even table, around 5.5 thousand on each side, which coincides with the reason stated above, extremely harsh Ottoman religious doctrine and exodus. Check „Ellen Clare Miller, Eastern Sketches – notes of scenery, schools and tent life in Syria and Palestine. Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Company. 1871“ if you wish to analyze exact numbers and the difficulties ANY demographic analysis pre 1900 entails.

At the end of 19.century, during the 5 Aliyahs, or the immigration periods, an estimated 3.million Jews migrated to Palestine area, under the Zionist motives, mostly from Europe. In the Modern era, apart from a few natural disasters, the only reason for Jews immigrating from „Arab countries“ is because of the Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquisition and immigration. Settler numbers prior to that are marginal, compared to the Aliyah migrations from Europe.

The first big step in the question that I partly opened with my answer is the year 1917, and the Ottoman defeat under Britain and the passing of the Balfour declaration. Quote :

„His Majesty's government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country."[ „

Wiki : The declaration was made in a letter from Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Baron Rothschild (Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild), a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The letter reflected the position of the British Cabinet, as agreed upon in a meeting on 31 October 1917. It further stated that the declaration is a sign of "sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations."

c)

It is the Jews who are surrounded and who have had to fight for their very lives against Arab onslaught many times and who haved lived for decades with their women and children specifically targeted by suicidal killers (whose families were paid $25,000 a hit by Saddam Hussein by the way). Despite this, Israeli Arabs are citizens who vote and can bring lawsuits (which they sometimes win) have their mosques and their religion. Find me this in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, etc!

For the first part of the comment, see what I wrote above, histories of nations (mind the word story in history) tend to be very complicated fishies, very easily bent and broken.

I have nothing to add to your „exercising ones religion“ comment, it rings completely true. But we do not debate modern day ideologies here, rather opposite, if anything, we should debate ancient ideologies, since they are the root of the poisonous wound.

About the killings, and terror attacks etc. I post this table from 2008, about the „effectiveness“ of the Palestinian war machine

Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!

I will not comment on the video links, I do not consider this type of argumenting viable for such a seriously delicate topic. Likewise I can return the favor with the link to the Massada2000 website and the s.h.i.t. list, and give you a counter argument for the frightenly imbecilic zionistic groups, but where would that lead us ?

All in all, in the first posting I may have come across ignorant for which I am sorry, but truth be told, the only reason I have, is, ironically, the same one with which you have attacked my reasoning. You saw them purely as terrorists, I posted that, as a balance check to the other side, whereas in reality my personal opinions on the whole matter are very mixed, and quite frankly, not appropriate for this portion of the forum.

I appologize if I hurt anyones feelings with the first, unexplained answer, I may have acted out of line. I am sorry.

The feral antipathy towards Israel, the concerted bid to leverage it out of the community of nations, accounts for the obstinate reluctance on the part of Western academics, intellectuals, professionals, churchmen and journalists to examine the true history of the region, which would expose the Palestinian claim to plenary proprietorship as largely fraudulent while buttressing the Jewish and Israeli title to rightful occupancy. As Joan Peters has shown in her scrupulously researched seven-year study From Time Immemorial, examining census reports and internal memoranda during the British Mandate, perhaps a majority of the “original” Palestinian inhabitants were relative newcomers to the territory in question, having migrated into the Holy Land from the surrounding Arab countries, mainly from what was then known as Greater Syria (i.e., Syria and Lebanon) when still part of the Ottoman empire, and afterward during the post-Balfour period.

Analogously, the Reverend James Parkes, in Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine, has built a powerful case for the Jewish, not the Palestinian, hereditament. His thesis has been recently strengthened by genetic research which has corroborated the provenance of Jews from the Middle East, basing its conclusions on the recently discovered DNA signature, called the Cohen Modal Haplotype, pointing toward a common ancestor dating back to the time of Aaron and Moses, circa 1000 B.C.E. (See also, among many such studies, the American Journal of Human Genetics, 2003, treating of Y-chromosome evidence for the origin of Ashkenazi Levites.)

As for the national collectivity we refer to as “Palestine,” it does not exist. There is, rather, a phenomenon we may call “Palestinianism,” a historically recent political movement rooted in hatred of Israel, palpable anti-Semitism, constructed memory and the Islamic summons to territorial conquest. No settlement in the land of Israel, with the possible exception of Ramla, has a name that indicates Arab extraction—they are mostly of Hebrew origin with a sprinkling of Greek and Latin, covered up at a later time with Arab appellations. There was not even a Palestinian national anthem until one was hastily dreamed up at the onset of the 1987 Intifada. In an Internet letter posted on November 6, 2002, Yashiko Sagamori asks “a few basic questions” about this imaginary Palestinian country: inter alia, “When was it founded and by whom? What were its borders? What was its form of government? Was Palestine ever recognized by [another] country? What was the name of its currency? And finally, since there is no such country today, what caused its demise and when did it occur?”

The historical record conclusively shows not only that there was never any such thing as a Palestinian nation but also that there is no Palestinian ethnicity—in the sense that there is a Jewish or Tibetan ethnicity—and that there was no coherent political grouping known as “Palestinians” until after the 1967 war. A Palestinian entity was only recognized by the Arab countries at the 1974 Rabat Summit Conference. (Although the Palestinian Liberation Organization was founded in 1964, it was largely an Egyptian affair controlled by Gamel Abdel Nasser.) 1967 is the founding year of the hypothesis now known as “Palestine.” What we call “Palestinian history” has just celebrated its forty-first birthday!

The designation “Palestinians” was not in official use under the Ottoman imperium and the British applied the term only to the Jewish inhabitants of the region. Local Arabs rejected the term “Palestine” and pressed for “Southern Syria” and even “Iraq.” Eli Hertz, president of Myths and Facts Inc., points out that the Territories “are filled with families named Elmisri (Egyptian), Chalabi (Syrian), Mugrabi (North Africa)”; and Habash, the surname of arch-terrorist George Habash, originates in Ethiopia (MythsandFacts.com, May 16, 2008). Unlike the original Jewish inhabitants of the area, these emigrant families were not driven out over the historical continuum—they were never there in the first place.

Dafna Yee, director of the JWD website, also explains that since “the borders of the Palestine territory were never clearly defined, it is safe to assume that a great many, if not most, of the ‘Palestinians’ never set foot in any part of what is now Israel and have as flimsy a claim to that identity as Arafat did”—Arafat was born in Egypt. She might also have mentioned Edward Said, another self-proclaimed Palestinian, who did in fact set foot in what is now Israel—he was born in a Jerusalem hospital where his parents calculated that the probability of a safe delivery was higher than in an Arab hospital, and was subsequently raised in Cairo where he spent the first twelve years of his life before moving to the West. With regard to Israel, fictions tend to multiply exponentially. In particular, that Israel was built on something called “Palestinian land” through a process of invasion and displacement is a myth that continues to gather momentum. On the contrary, Israel is not only the ancient Jewish homeland, but in modern times it was founded as nation by legal land purchases and legitimized by the United Nations.

Undeterred, Palestinian human rights activists continue to propound a bald-faced lie. For example, Susan Abulhawa, author of the novel The Scar of David, asserted in an article for the Paris magazine Libèration (March 18, 2008) that Israel was established on “the ancient land of Palestine,” a historical artifice created on the instant. The reader will look in vain in Abulhawa’s piece for any mention of the fact that between 1932 and 1944 half a million Arabs poured into Palestine to profit from conditions prevailing in the Jewish communities. That she claims in the same article that “Jesus was Palestinian,” in direct contravention of the Christian Gospels, may tell us something about the Palestinian style of argument. The Palestinian “narrative” is a synthetic athenaeum whose textual repertory is, for the most part, either forged or imagined. Palestinians fall back on what is by now a classic maneuver: the attempt to achieve unity and manufacture purpose by the denial of fact. But the fact is that the “Palestinian entity” as such is non-historical and would more accurately be defined as a Palestinian nonentity, its documentary grounding largely fabricated and its political aspirations dependent on a volatile mix of ignorance and deception.

In How to Do things with Words, Philosopher J.L. Austin has made a useful distinction between two kinds of speech acts, the referential and the constative. The referential delineates an actual state of affairs, the constative establishes not a quality but a social function. Austin offers an analogy from baseball: the ball may travel across the center of the plate, a perfect strike, but if the umpire calls “ball,” that’s how it registers on the scoreboard and operates in the game. For much of the world today, umpires (and crowds) engaged in the production of their own referents and bent on the reconstruction of reality, an Israeli “strike” will almost always count as a “ball.” The referential has been reconfigured as the constative, despite what a later replay may bring to light—the Gaza beach hoax, the Lebanese ambulance hoax, the al-Durah hoax, and so on. When it comes to Israel, the constative will almost always trump the referential and a collective assessment obliterate an objective factor. The Israeli pitcher throws a strike; the Arab batter receives a base on balls. An intimate congruence has been performatively created between the report and the referent minus the slightest hint of the semantic distance that stretches between the two. The former remains parasitic upon the latter.

Archeologist and historian David Meir-Levy makes this clear in his new book, with its Austinesque title History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression, in which he tries to dig up the buried facts and return to the referential. He points out that “the Arabs of the area had their own designation for the region: Balad esh-Sham (the country, or province of Damascus.)” It was only after the 1967 war that the PLO reframed the issue by “inventing a ‘historic Palestine’ ex nihilo, an ancient ‘Palestinian people’ who had lived in their ‘homeland’ from ‘time immemorial’ [and] who were forced from their homeland by the Zionists…” The idea of a Palestinian nation was hatched, principally by Yasser Arafat, “for political purposes and to justify and legitimize terrorism and genocide.” Arafat himself did not disguise his intentions. In his own words, the aim of the PLO was “not to impose our will on [Israel], but to destroy it in order to take its place.” Further, no Palestinian leader, neither Arafat nor Abbas nor any of their chief negotiators, have acknowledged that there are no 1967 borders to which Israel is required to return. In fact, there are only armistice lines, and the Jordanian peace agreement with Israel specified that these armistice lines would have no bearing on future negotiations to determine final borders.

In this context, it is obvious that the propaganda war against Israel, joined by many in the West, is an indispensable part of the violent campaign to erase the country from the map. The strategy at work in all these instances of malfeasance is obvious: if the lie about Israel is repeated often enough, it will eventually be accepted as truth. Strike three will be called as ball four. The effectiveness of this strategy is borne out by the findings of a BBC global survey, released in March 2007, which skewers Israel as the most negatively-viewed country in the world and shows how successful the BBC and the like-minded media have been in pursuing their hatchet job on the Jewish state.

This clandestine design has penetrated into the domain of presumably objective scholarship as well. The prestigious Macmillan Reference USA encyclopedia contains an entry on anti-Semitism culled in part from a controversial article in the journal Race Traitor, authored by the anti-Zionist Jew Noel Ignatiev. The brunt of the article makes Jews themselves responsible for anti-Semitism, which brings the rationale for the creation of the Jewish state into question. Cognitive distortion is the name of the game. As Aldous Huxley has one of his characters reflect in Brave New World, suggesting the famous dicta of Hitler and Goebbels about the reiterative efficacy of the “Big Lie,” “Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------David Solway is the award-winning author of over twenty-five books of poetry, criticism, educational theory, and travel. He is a contributor to magazines as varied as the Atlantic, the Sewanee Review, Books in Canada, and the Partisan Review. He is the author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and Identity. A new book on Jewish and Israeli themes, Hear, O Israel!, will be released by CanadianValuesPress this fall.

ANKARA: Cheap cover prices and a rise in nationalist sentiment have made an unlikely best-seller in Turkey of Adolf Hitler's infamous autobiography, "Mein Kampf." The book was first published in Turkey in 1939, when Axis and Allied countries were competing for Turkey's soul as they tried to woo it away from the neutrality it would maintain until the very end of World War II.

But since January, the book has sold more than 50,000 copies and is number four on the best-seller list drawn up by the D&R bookstore chain.

"'Mein Kampf' has always been a sleeper, a secret best-seller," said Oguz Tektas of Mefisto editions, one of several publishing houses to re-release the book Hitler wrote while in jail in 1925. "We took it out of the closet for purely commercial reasons." His company's sole aim, he stressed, was "to make money," which they did by slashing the cover price.

"Mein Kampf," published by about a dozen companies over the years, always sold at a fairly steady annual rate of about 20,000 copies at some 20 New Turkish Lira ($15) a copy.

The Mefisto edition retails at YTL5.90 and sold 23,000 copies in two months.

The readership? "Those who want to know about a man who wreaked death and destruction on the world," Tektas said.

"Mostly young people," said Sami Kilic, owner of the Emre publishing house, another company on the "Mein Kampf" bandwagon, which sold 26,000 copies from a run of 31,000, released in late January.

"The times we live in have a definite impact on sales," Kilic said. "It is an astonishing phenomenon." He linked interest in the book to Turkey's bid to join the EU, seen by the right wing as a desertion of national values, and rising sentiment against the U. S. and its ally Israel over the treatment they are perceived as meting out to the Iraqis and the Palestinians, respectively.

"This book, which does not contain a single ounce of humanity, unfortunately appears to be taken seriously in this country," political scientist Dogu Ergil complained in a recent newspaper interview.

He agreed that the unexpected popularity of "Mein Kampf" in this Muslim-majority country has its roots in a rise in anti-American sentiment sparked by the occupation of Iraq and anti-Semitism resulting from Israel's Palestinian policy.

"Nazism, buried in the dustbin of history in Europe, is beginning to re-emerge in Turkey," he warned.

But despite what the sales may imply, Turkey has never been an anti-Semitic country - on the contrary, it has been a safe haven for Jews ever since the 15th century, when Sultan Bayezit II first took in Spanish Jews fleeing the inquisition.

It's My Jihad in an Islamic context. "Massive Cairo book fair sets religious tone," by Alain Navarro for AFP, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:

CAIRO (AFP) - At the Cairo Book Fair, the largest and most important event of its kind in the Arab world, religious works dominate, while literature and scientific texts are often pushed to the margins. Millions of Cairenes have been thronging to the fair giving it an air of carnival on the vast exhibition grounds covering 80,000 square meters (861,000 square feet) in northern Cairo and featuring some 1,400 stands of books and CDs.

By Sunday, when the 39th annual fair comes to a close, organisers estimate some two million people will have visited, dwarfing similar events in Beirut, Casablanca and Abu Dhabi -- though many complain that the crowds are just there to picnic and buy religious books....

Of the 700 Egyptian and Arab publishers at the fair, the vast majority stock religious books on their shelves. "Even we reserve about a quarter of our catalog for them," said publisher Ansari.

Korans of all styles, from the simple to the leather-bound, share shelf space with collections of religious sayings and fatwas as well as their more modern incarnations on cassettes and compact disks.

The collected works of late venerable preachers like Egypt's Sheikh Mohammed Shaarawi and Saudi Arabia's Abdel Aziz bin Baz were present as well, though there was stiff competition from the young "new look" television preachers like Amr Khaled.

"It's become a real business, but this fundamentalism comes from Saudi Arabia and stays with the cynical encouragement of the powers that be," said best-selling Egyptian author Aswani whose social satire the "Yacoubian Building" has achieved fame far beyond Egypt's borders....

The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and of course plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" for sale.

"It makes up a big part of our success, especially among the 18 to 25 crowd," said Mahmud Abdallah of the Syrian-Egyptian Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi publishing house.

"Allowing the sale of books like 'Mein Kampf' is a total scandal," said Mohammed Arkoun, professor emeritus of Islamic history at the Sorbonne, for whom the Arab cultural production, at least as seen through the lens of the Cairo Book Fair, "reflects above all, a certain emptiness."

The Muslim groups which today threaten the West with terrorism, subversion and insurgency are not only “fascist” in the broad sociological sense, but can trace their literal historical origins to Nazism and its genocidal ambitions.

The ideology of the Islamists whose ranks today include not only al-Qaeda but also Hamas and Hezbollah, originated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928 by Sheikh Hassan al-Banna. The Muslim Brotherhood finds not just its roots, but much of its symbolism, terminology, and political priorities deep within the heart of Nazi fascism.

For al-Banna, as for many other Muslims worldwide, the end of the caliphate, although brought about by secular Muslim Turks, was a sacrilege against Islam for which they blamed the non-Muslim West. It was to strike back against these evils that al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928.

Al-Banna’s antipathy towards Western modernity soon moved him to shape the Brotherhood into an organization seeking to check the secularist tendencies in Muslim society and return to traditional Islamic values. Al-Banna recruited followers from a vast cross-section of Egyptian society by addressing issues such as colonialism, public health, educational policy, natural resources management, social inequalities, Arab nationalism, and the weakness of the Islamic world. Among the perspectives he drew on to address these issues were the anti-capitalist doctrines of European Marxism and especially fascism.

As the Muslim Brotherhood expanded during the 1930s and extended its activities well beyond its original religious revivalism, al-Banna began dreaming a greater Muslim dream: the restoration of the Caliphate. He would describe, in inflammatory speeches, the horrors of hell expected for heretics, and consequently, the need for Muslims to return to their purest religious roots, and resume the great and final holy war, or jihad, against the non-Muslim world.

The first big step in the international jihad al-Banna envisioned came in the form of trans-national terrorism during the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, when one of the most famous of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti (Supreme Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, incited his followers to a three-year war against the Jews in Palestine and against the British who administered the Palestine Mandate. In 1936 the Brotherhood had about 800 members, but by 1938, just two years into the Revolt, its membership had grown to almost 200,000, with fifty branches in Egypt alone. By the end of the 1930s, there were more than a half million active members registered, in more than 2,000 branches across the Arab world.

To achieve that broader dream of a global jihad, the Brotherhood developed a network of underground cells, stole weapons, trained fighters, formed secret assassination squads, founded sleeper cells of subversive supporters in the ranks of the army and police, and waited for the order to go public with terrorism, assassinations, and suicide missions. It was during this time that the Muslim Brotherhood found a soul mate in Nazi Germany.

The Reich offered great power connections to the movement, but the relationship brokered by the Brotherhood was more than a marriage of convenience. Long before the war, al-Banna had developed an Islamic religious ideology which previewed Hitler’s Nazism. Both movements sought world conquest and domination. Both were triumphalist and supremacist (in Nazism the Aryan must rule, while in al-Banna’s Islam, the Muslim religion must hold dominion). Both advocated subordination of the individual to a central power. Both were explicitly anti-nationalist in the sense that they believed in the liquidation of the nation-state in favor of a trans-national unifying community. And both rabidly hated the Jews and sought their destruction.

As the Brotherhood’s political and military alliance with Nazi Germany developed, these parallels facilitated a full-blown alliance, with all the pomp and panoply of formal state visits, de facto ambassadors, and overt as well as sub rosa joint ventures. Al-Banna’s followers easily transplanted into the Arab world a newly Nazified form of traditional Muslim Jew-hatred, with Arab translations of Mein Kampf (translated into Arabic as My Jihad) and other Nazi anti-Semitic works, including Der Sturmer hate-cartoons, adapted to portray the Jew as the demonic enemy of Allah.

When the Second World War broke out, Al-Banna worked to firm up a formal alliance with Hitler and Mussolini. But the best known Nazi sympathizer in the Muslim Brotherhood was the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one-time President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. The Grand Mufti was a bridge figure in terms of transplanting the Nazi genocide in Europe into the post-war Middle East and creating a fascist heritage for the Palestinian national movement.

Al-Husseini used his office as a powerful bully pulpit from which to preach anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and (turning on his patrons) anti-British vitriol. He was directly involved in the organization of the 1929 riots which destroyed the 3,000-year-old Jewish community of Hebron. And he was quick to see that he had a natural ally in Hitler. As early as spring 1933, he assured the German consul in Jerusalem that "the Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist, anti-democratic governmental system to other countries."

The youth organization established by the Mufti used Nazi emblems, names and uniforms. Germany reciprocated by setting up scholarships for Arab students, hiring Arab apprentices at German firms, and inviting Arab party leaders to the Nuremberg party rallies and Arab military leaders to Wehrmacht maneuvers. Most significantly, the German Propaganda Ministry developed strong links with the Grand Mufti and with Arabic newspapers, creating a propaganda legacy that would outlast Husseini, Hitler, and all the other figures of World War II.

In September 1937, Adolf Eichmann and another SS officer carried out an exploratory mission in the Middle East lasting several weeks, and including a friendly productive visit with the Grand Mufti. It was after that visit, in fact, that the Mufti went on the Nazi payroll as a Nazi agent and propagandist. During the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-39, which al-Husseini helped organize and which Germany funded, the swastika was used as a mark of identity on Arabic leaflets and graffiti. Arab children welcomed each other with the Hitler salute, and a sea of German flags and pictures of Hitler were displayed at celebrations.

After meeting with Hitler on November 21, 1941, Husseini praised the Germans because they “know how to get rid of the Jews, and that brings us close to the Germans and sets us in their camp.” On March 1, 1944, the Mufti called out in a broadcast from Zeesen: “Arabs! Rise as one and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. Kill them with your teeth if need be. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor.” His own memoirs, and the testimony of German defendants at the Nuremberg trials later on, showed that he planned a death camp modeled on Auschwitz to be constructed near Nablus for the genocide of Palestine’s Jews.

It was the Mufti who urged Hitler, Himmler, and General Ribbentrop to concentrate Germany’s considerable industrial and military resources on the extermination of European Jewry. The foremost Muslim spiritual leader of his time, he helped in this effort by lobbying to prevent Jews from leaving Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, even though those governments were initially willing to let them go. As Eichmann himself recounted: “We have promised him [the Mufti] that no European Jew would enter Palestine any more.”

While GM brings some citations to bear, I will merely offer two points

a) The purpose of my reference to the sales of Mein Kampf in the Arab world prior to WW2 was to establish the existence of vicious, virulent hatred of Jews well prior to the establishment of Israel i.e. the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is intolerance of Jews (and in the absence thereof of Coptic Christians and in the absence thereof any kind of Christian and in the absence thereof Muslims of other schools of thought that ones own etc etc etc) I see GM is fleshing this point out.

b) Please do not confuse the vigor of the conversation for anger. We do not seek here an echo chamber. To the contrary we seek Truth. Your presence and participation here are most welcome.

c) I will seek to answer some of the particulars of your most recent post tomorrow.

Marc

PS: Although I missed wishing Happy Passover a few days ago, I would like to take the occasion to wish Happy Easter to our Christian friends here. The Christian message of forgiveness is a most worthy one.

Off to do some Easter Egg Hunt stuff with the family (my wife is Catholic btw), but a quick addition to the comments in my previous post:

If I am not mistaken, Persia changed its name to Iran (i.e. a form of the word "Aryan") due to Nazi influence in the 1930s. Can anyone find a citation for or against this? Assuming it to be true for the moment, again we see virulent Jew hatred prior to the existence of Israel-- so the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is religious hatred fomented within the ranks of Islam.

Off to do some Easter Egg Hunt stuff with the family (my wife is Catholic btw), but a quick addition to the comments in my previous post:

If I am not mistaken, Persia changed its name to Iran (i.e. a form of the word "Aryan") due to Nazi influence in the 1930s. Can anyone find a citation for or against this? Assuming it to be true for the moment, again we see virulent Jew hatred prior to the existence of Israel-- so the problem is not the existence of Israel, the problem is religious hatred fomented within the ranks of Islam.

Denial of Holocaust nothing new in Iran / Ties to Hitler led to plots against British and Jews

January 08, 2006|By Edwin Black

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shot to the forefront of Holocaust denial with his rabble-rousing remarks last month. But it's more like self-denial. The president of Iran need only look to his country's Hitler-era past to discover that Iran and Iranians were strongly connected to the Holocaust and the Hitler regime, as was the entire Islamic world under the leadership of the mufti of Jerusalem.

Iran's axis with the Third Reich began during the prewar years, when it welcomed Nazi Gestapo agents and other operatives to Tehran, allowing them to use the city as a base for Middle East agitation against the British and the region's Jews.

Key among these German agents was Fritz Grobba, Berlin's envoy to the Middle East, who was often called "the German Lawrence," because he promised a Pan-Islamic state stretching from Casablanca to Tehran.

Relations between Berlin and Tehran were strong from the moment Hitler came to power in 1933. At that time, Reza Shah Pahlavi's nation was known as Persia. The shah became a stalwart admirer of Hitler, Nazism and the concept of the Aryan master race. He also sought the Reich's help in reducing British petro-political domination.

So intense was the shah's identification with the Third Reich that in 1935 he renamed his ancient country "Iran," which in Farsi means Aryan and refers to the Proto-Indo-European lineage that Nazi racial theorists and Persian ethnologists cherished.

The idea for the name change was suggested by the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of Hitler's trusted banker, Hjalmar Schacht. From that point, all Iranians were constantly reminded that their country shared a common bond with the Nazi regime.

Shortly after World War II broke out in 1939, the Mufti of Jerusalem crafted a strategic alliance with Hitler to exchange Iraqi oil for active Arab and Islamic participation in the murder of Jews in the Mideast and Eastern Europe. This was predicated on support for a pan-Arab state and Arab control over Palestine.During the war years, Iran became a haven for Gestapo agents. It was from Iran that the seeds of the abortive 1941 pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad were planted. After Churchill's forces booted the Nazis out of Iraq in June 1941, German aircrews supporting Nazi bombers escaped across Iraq's northern border back into Iran.

Likewise, the mufti of Jerusalem was spirited across the border to Tehran, where he continued to call for the destruction of the Jews and the defeat of the British.

His venomous rhetoric filled the newspapers and radio broadcasts in Tehran. The mufti was a vocal opponent of allowing Jewish refugees to be transported or ransomed into Jewish Palestine. Instead, he wanted them shipped to the gas chambers of Poland.

In the summer of 1941, the mufti, with the support of key Iranian military and government leaders, advocated implementing in Iran what had failed months earlier in Iraq. The plan once again was for a total diversion of oil from the Allies to the Nazis, in exchange for the accelerated destruction of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Nazis' support for an Arab state. Through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., Iran had already been supplying Hitler's forces in occupied Czechoslovakia and Austria.

Now, the mufti agitated to cut off the British and the Allies completely and supply Germany in its push against Russia.

In October 1941, British, USSR other allied forces invaded Iran to break up the Iran-Nazi alliance. Pro-Nazi generals and ministers were arrested, and the shah's son was installed in power. The mufti scampered into the Italian embassy, where he shaved his beard and dyed his hair. In this disguise, he was allowed to leave the country along with the rest of the Italian delegation.

Once the mufti relocated permanently to Berlin, where he established his own Reich-supported "bureau," he was given airtime on Radio Berlin. From Berlin and other fascist capitals in Europe, the mufti continued to agitate for international Jewish destruction, as well as a pan-Islamic alliance with the Nazi regime.

He called upon all Muslims to "kill the Jews wherever you see them." In Tehran's marketplace, it was common to see placards that declared, "In heaven, Allah is your master. On Earth, it is Adolf Hitler."

When the mufti raised three divisions of Islamic Waffen SS to undertake cruel operations in Bosnia, among the 30,000 killers were some volunteer contingents from Iran. Iranian Nazis, along with the other Muslim Waffen SS, operated under the direct supervision of Heinrich Himmler and were responsible for barbarous actions against Jews and others in Bosnia. Recruitment for the murderous "Handschar Divisions" was done openly in Iran.

Iran and its leaders were not only aware of the Holocaust, they played both sides. The country offered overland escape routes for refugee Jews fleeing Nazi persecution to Israel -- and later fleeing postwar Iraqi fascist persecution -- but only in exchange for extortionate passage fees.

While traditional anti-Semitism remains prevalent among extremist fringe groups and populations where xenophobic attitudes persist, a “new” anti-Semitism manifests itself in opposition to Zionism and to the existence or policies of the state of Israel.

Traditional anti-Semitism, with its historic linkage to Nazism and fascism, tends to be overt and is considered unacceptable and illegitimate by much of the mainstream in Western Europe, North America, and beyond. Its hallmarks include:

drawing on the age-old blood libel that depicts Jews as bloodthirsty murderers and cannibals

By contrast, "new anti-Semitism" is characterized by anti-Zionist and anti-Israel criticism that is anti-Semitic in its effect — whether or not in its intent — and is more subtle and thus frequently escapes condemnation.

According to the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), anti-Zionist and anti-Israel criticism -- regardless of the motive -- become anti-Semitic when they entail:

denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination;

applying double standards to the state of Israel;

using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis;

drawing comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis; or

holding Jews collectively responsible for actions by the state of Israel.

In his classic 1969 article, “The Socialism of Fools—The Left, the Jews and Israel,” Seymour Martin Lipset wrote: "There is a dangerous confluence between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, though the two concepts are not always identical. Anti-Zionism is often used to conceal hatred of Jews." He then enumerated the following criteria for distinguishing between anti-Semitism and "legitimate criticism of Israel":

"Consider the source. Is the speaker someone with a history of anti-Jewish attitudes?"

"Critics who habitually single out Israel for condemnation while ignoring far worse actions by other countries (especially other Middle Eastern countries) are anti-Semitic."

"Likening Israel to Nazi Germany, or to traditional anti-Jewish stereotypical behavior is another sure sign of Jew-baiting."

"Attacks on the merits of Israel's existence rather than individual government policies are anti-Semitic."

In a similar vein, a 2008 State Department report says:

"New forms of anti-Semitism often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that—whether intentionally or unintentionally—has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel’s perceived faults to its Jewish character. This new anti-Semitism is common throughout the Middle East and in Muslim communities in Europe, but it is not confined to these populations.... [T]he collective effect of unremitting criticism of Israel, coupled with a failure to pay attention to regimes that are demonstrably guilty of grave violations, has the effect of reinforcing the notion that the Jewish state is one of the sources, if not the greatest source, of abuse of the rights of others, and thus intentionally or not encourages anti-Semitism."

Adapted from "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism: A Report Provided to the United States Congress," by The U.S. Department of State (2008).

Ok, about the picture...as I recall correctly I first saw it in a Nouvel Observateur version quite long ago, when I was visiting mother in France, but I am not definitive on that. Recently I found it in this article from Tristam, but since the pic is mutilated with ads, I looked for another one.

@ GM : Mannn, you are a hardliner no doubt. But last I checked we are talking on a DISCUSSION forum, not a linking referenced articles forum. In contrast to you I can link you AT LEAST 15 articles from different sources and different viewpoints that tackle different areas of interest on the topic, not just those that stick to my version. Make that twice as many books. But what will we acomplish with this ? Im writing my ass of here, thinking and argumenting my point, but for you linking articles and sources that support your view on things is a self suficient argument in a debate. Actually I would rather call shoving other peoples opinions down your collegues throats, indoctrination.

Moreover, seems like you havent really read my post that well. Citing Solway will hardly get you credit points with people in the know, but ok ill play. First of, some of what he talks about in the article is exactly the same stuff I have already written in my post.

“Palestine,” it does not exist.

Gee diddly do, oh really. What he calls „Palestinianism“ is really a „coming together“ of a people, a national identity, which of course hasnt existed before 18 century for the simple fact, that nations and states in the modern term (monoply on violence, subject/sovereign, centralised government, etc. ) havent existed anywhere.

Word Palestine alone is a cognant, that derives fom the archaism „Philistine“ or Land of the Philistines. They were a people, apparently of Aegean origins, who occupied the southern coast of Canaan in Iron Age. The fact that there are archaic greek, byzantine greek AND Latin words for Palestine derails the argument that „Palestine“ is a modern construct. It is and WAS a conventional name since around 5BC up to the 1948 war to describe a region between the Mediterannean and the Jordan river. Like most of the stuff in history its borders changed, bent,destroyed, reappeared, etc..the area has given ground to the most diverse and dominant cultural forces in history. From Persians, to Greeks to Seleucids to Romans,then the Arabian conquest, Abbasids and Umayads, to Byznatine rule, Crusaders, Mamluks to Ottoman rule. In most of these cases the lands were divided differently, since they had different socio-economical formations, from slavery to european feudalism to byzantine feudalism to Ottoman Beylerbey provincial administration. This alone makes it IMPOSSIBLE to draw any type of historicistic conclusions of what we think of Palestine today, used to mean.

The historical record conclusively shows not only that there was never any such thing as a Palestinian nation but also that there is no Palestinian ethnicity—in the sense that there is a Jewish or Tibetan ethnicity

I would most certainly like to see these historical records, and what they entail that shows a nation as „a nation“. Solway typically misadresses the term nation from a modern standpoint, whereas, again, nations in that modern context can start being thought of in above mentioned manner from about 1800. Traditionally every person that individualised himself with the traditional core ethos of a certain group was thought as a member of that group. Thats why the different ethnical structures in Europe varied so harshly. Take the term Germanians for example. To your average person, it calls to mind, giant, violent, noble savages, wheres in truth, Germania was a name for a region, and the notion for a historical ethno lingusitic group that used Indo-European Germanic languages. Germania was inhabited by different tribes, including some Celtic, Baltic, Scythian, and proto-Slavic peoples. The tribal and ethnic makeup changed over the centuries as a result of assimilation and, most importantly, migrations. The Germanic people spoke several different dialects.

In some cases, especially involving transnational migration, or colonial expansion, ethnicity is linked to nationality. Anthropologists and historians, following the modernist understanding of ethnicity as proposed by Benedict Anderson, see nations and nationalism as developing with the rise of the modern state. Thus, in the West, the notion of ethnicity, like race and nation, developed in the context of European colonial expansion.In the nineteenth century, modern states generally sought legitimacy through their claim to represent "nations." Nation-states, however, invariably include populations that have been excluded from national life for one reason or another. Under these conditions—when people moved from one state to another,or one state conquered or colonized peoples beyond its national boundaries—ethnic groups were formed by people who identified with one nation, but lived in another state.

Is there such thing as an American ethnicity ? Is/was there any such thing as Czechoslovakian ethnicity ? Is there na Italian ethnicity ? This implication that the nation cannot exist or have history since it does not have intro and outrovertive reflective ethnicity is completely irrelevant.

Again Solway makes a common mistake of „amateur historians“ who do not recall the differences between national, political and ethnical borders, which ARE NOT and DO not imply the same conclusion.

1967 is the founding year of the hypothesis now known as “Palestine.” What we call “Palestinian history” has just celebrated its forty-first birthday!

If anything what he should have written there is „what we call as Palestinian peoples history“. Even that would have been horribly wrong. What hypothesis ? Palestinian what, people or land ? Or both ? Palestine within Byzantine borders meant something different to Palestine under the Assyrian empire and something different to what the WZO proposed at the 1919 Paris peace conference.

As I already wrote, the endonym „Palestinian“ as a concept of a nation of the Palestinian people by the Arabs of Palestine began just before WW1. And this concept still changes to this day.

Solway really should stick to poetry and literal critique.

@ Guro Crafty

Thank you for the thoughts. I look forward to reading your post.

Before I finish, a few words about the Nazis, Iran, Aryans, Persia, etc..

First off, we need to settle something regarding the word Aryan. It is a loanword from sanskrit Arya, meaning Noble. It can imply several different things.

In scholary usage it refers mostly to the Indo Iranian languages and their speakers. In dated usage it refers to Indo European languages and their speakers.

Besides that, the word is getting thrown out and about, to whatever meaning and reason. From Hindu nationalists, to Nazi racial theory, the „nordic“ type of person with blonde hair, blue eyes, high growth, to the white supremacy theory about the peoples who are native Indo-Europeans of the Western or European branch of the Indo-European peoples, as opposed to the Eastern or Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European peoples.

What you guys, and Gms article say above is propagandist misconstruction at its finest. Even though It holds true, that the Shah had nascent ties to Nazi Germany, it was not, by any means the reason they changed the name from Persia to Iran.The Zend persian „ariya“ refers to „venerable“ or even a national name.

The term „Iran“ has been in use natively preety much since the Sassanid empire, up to the year 1940, when the term became known internationally, and replaced the ethnonym Persia. Both "Persia" and "Iran" are used interchangeably in cultural contexts. The name "Iran" is a cognate of "Aryan", and really roughly means "land of the Aryans"and in modern Persian derives from the Proto-Iranian term Aryānā, first attested in Zoroastrianism's Avesta tradition. In historiography, Ariya- and Airiia- are even attested as an ethnic designator in Achaemenid inscriptions.

When reading about Hitler and his ideology and propaganda et al. You have to be very careful, since he is an epitome of „picking what you like from all around and stuff it into one big neat pile of WTF“. At one point in his „career“ he became obsessed with finding the pure race, and traveled almost off world to find his agenda. From aryans in Iran to Tibet. Now as some may know he was obsessed with Nietzsche, although he read it in a completely oppurtunistic manner. Nietzche on the other hand had a thing (to put it bluntly ) for Zoroaster/Zarathustra the prophet. Through this prism he started to plow around Iran to find the „aryan“ he read so largely about in Zoroaster texts, sadly little did he know that this „aryan“ meant something totally other to what his version of „aryan“ was all about. The reason why alot of Iranians/Persians got excited about the book was, since it was promoted as a book that promotes the domination of the aryan race, the aryan ideology. Needless to say, the aryan race in that or any other context doesnt exist, and what they read about, and were so excited about was not their Aryan, but that of the NSDAP.

"Palestinian" is a modern propaganda construct. The islamic ideal is the "umma" rather than ethnicity based nations. The "Palestinian" identity is false to anyone who knows the history. The dialect of levantine arabic spoken in that region doesn't even use a "P" sound. "Filistin" is as close as then can get to saying "Palestine".

The arabs that lived in Israel and fled awaiting the jews to be pushed into the sea were not "Palestinians", they were arabs. The "Palestinian" claim is like Americans of european ancestry claiming they are member of the Lakota tribe because they lived in Fargo.

Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.

This is long. Probably my last incursion in this, I am loosing to much time with this type of research.

The arabs that lived in Israel and fled awaiting the jews to be pushed into the sea were not "Palestinians", they were arabs. The "Palestinian" claim is like Americans of european ancestry claiming they are member of the Lakota tribe because they lived in Fargo.

Ok, first of all. These things are far from solved and noted like you portray them to be. The only thing that is clear to someone who „knows the history“ is that it cant even be called history. What it is, is an open discussion panel on principal historic conceptions and facts based on scientific apparatus, that are inherent to historical studies. One sided interpretations of facts or sources of any kind that nudge the totality of context in your favor isnt exactly an objective debate, unless of course you want that ? Hmmm, where have I spoken of indoctrination before ??

Again, History means a very specific thing, we are loooong past the 19.century Rankean notion of „wie es eigentlich gewesen“ that history is a sequence of tools that search for what „actually“ transpired.

This a very Marxist linear traditionalistic perception of time, which makes me surprised, since a while ago you actually encouraged me NOT to read anything with the term Marx in it.

The islamic ideal is the "umma" rather than ethnicity based nations...

Second of all, I see you have adopted the Solway method of understanding what a nation is. OR you just dont read what I write. Ethnicity and nation have absolutely nothing in common and are in no shape or form connected as pre or post (if thats even a word) requisites. And I have no idea what the city of ancient Sumer, Umma has anything to do here ? Unless you mean the Ummah, collection of nation states. You oversimplify here, since ummah can be understood in several meanings. One is the context of the so called pan Arabism (connected to the arabic nationalism, that all arabs comprise a single nation, etc etc). Then we have the context of Islam :

The phrase Ummah Wahida in the Qur'an (the "One Community") refers to all of the Islamic world unified. The Quran says: “You [Muslims] are the best nation brought out for Mankind, commanding what is righteous (Ma'ruf, lit. "recognized [as good]") and forbidding what is wrong (Munkar, lit. "unrecognized [as good]")…” [3:110].

On the other hand, in Arabic, Ummah can also be used in the more Western sense of nation, for example: Al-Umam Al-Muttahida, the United Nations.

The dialect of levantine arabic spoken in that region doesn't even use a "P" sound. "Filistin" is as close as then can get to saying "Palestine"....

Ok, which dialect ? Which specific region ? There are several dialects of levantine arabic. And for the record, the dialect spoken in the region is actually called Palestinian Arabic, it has 3 subgroups : Rural, urban and bedouin. Whereas each of them has tremendous differences not only in phonetics but in grammatical structures.

There are noticeable differences between Palestinian Arabic and other forms of Levantine Arabic such as Syrian Arabic and Lebanese Arabic. However, none of these is invariable, given the differences of dialect within Palestinian Arabic itself.

Until relatively recently the Arabic spoken in the Ottoman sanjak of Syria was considered a single Syrian dialect, see F. Crow if you are more interested in this.

And what kind of role does phonetics play here ? Anglo saxon languages also dont use the word Č, for Črna gora for example, but you call it Montenegro, which is a literal transliteration of the word. How does that make the concept of a Montenegrean nation not viable just because it is pronounced differently in native tongue ??

"Palestinian" is a modern propaganda construct.. The "Palestinian" identity is false to anyone who knows the history.

Herodotus, as far back as 430BC in his Histories, clearly speaks of a wider area than the Philistia from the bible. He literally refers to a "district of Syria, called Palaistinê" (Herodotus' Description of the East Mediterranean Coast, Anson F. Rainey, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 321 (Feb., 2001), pp. 57–63 )

340Bc, Aristotle speaks in his Meteorology, "Again if, as is fabled, there is a lake in Palestine, such that if you bind a man or beast and throw it in it floats and does not sink, this would bear out what we have said.“ (http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/meteorology.2.ii.html)

100 AD, Plutarch, in Parallel Lives : "Armenia, where Tigranes reigns, king of kings, and holds in his hands a power that has enabled him to keep the Parthians in narrow bounds, to remove Greek cities bodily into Media, to conquer Syria and Palestine, to put to death the kings of the royal line of Seleucus, and carry away their wives and daughters by violence." (http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lucullus.html)

lets skip a few years, too many to point out.

1225AD : Yaqut al-Hamawi, Dictionary of Geographies "Filastin is the last of the provinces of Syria towards Egypt. Its capital is Jerusalem." (Guy le Strange (1890). Palestine Under the Moslems from AD 650 to 1500 )

1856 AD : James Redhouse, An English and Turkish dictionary: Regarded as the original and authoritative Ottoman-English dictionary, translates Holy Land as dari-filastin (House of Palestine)

So, construct of Palestine, land of Palestine, Palestinian people, Palestinian territory are all different horses.You do not perceive that the situation has many different levels on which it is problematic. The ethnogenesis of the Arabians, Palestinians, Jews whoever you wanna take isnt really anything special, you have impossible cases like these and even worse, with complete lack of ALL primary sources all over the place in Europe, but the catch in this specific case is, it is the most potent, most viral case of political inflammation and misuse, or better said ab-use of, what is generally a perfectly normal case of historical progression/analysis.

Are you claiming that Iran just coincidentally decided to become Iran rather than Persia in 1935? What of all the muslim member of the SS? Coincidental again?

Not at all. I wonder whom are my hours of writing this dedicated to. Shortly repeating myself, at that time the word „Iran“ went in international use, correctly stated by you, the act of „change“ was set in the wake of the NSDAP influence, but the word itself hasnt got anything to do with it.

And some more info about the muslim members of the SS which you like to bring up so fast in other topics also. It sounds very useful, as an argument to your cause. All the muslims in the SS. Legioons and legions of them.Untill you start digging around of course. Let me do it for you, if you will even read it that is.

The notorious Waffen Schutzstaffel, or the Wafen SS was a MULTI ETHNICAL force of the Reich. It comprised people from Muslim Bosniaks, to Catholic Croats, to Orthodox Serbs and Soviet Muslims, to Finnish, Bulgarian, Netherlandian and even British nationals.. Its main objectives were to aid in fighting the more and more troubling local Partisan forces in Yugoslavia, Russia and to an extent Poland. Although they werent directly connected in the Holocaust, they were used in the more drastic cases of military violence and killings. Besides the largest Russian Cossacks division, the biggest division of non German SS personnel were the Croatian Hanđar divisions, that included around 20 thousand Bosnian Muslims ( who were, by the way, considered ethnic Croats during WW2), which was by and large the biggest muslim division in the whole military apparatus of the Reich. There was a reason behind this, since Himmler had an idea that the Balkan Muslims were special, and different to other Muslims in the case that they were neither Slavs nor Turks, but actually Aryans that adopted Islam.

Additionally, there were pockets of SS units consisting primarily of American, Indian, some Arabs, Tartars amongst others. The numberwork on the aforementioned is based on gueswork at best. In fact, there were even units, such as the Dirlewanger brigade that accepted persecuted peoples such as Homosexuals, Gypsies and political prisoners.

This opens up a very specific, different and mindboggingly deep topic of collaborations during the WW2, but lets just put it this way. Most of the collaborators sought to work with the Nazis in specific ways that would let them realize some of their own nationalistic/rasistic proliferation of their specific space/state, most probably from some semi-deluded history of half truths. Slovenia had a very grey post WW2 period of dealing with collaborators, and I guess you wouldnt try to argument the fact since part of my nation worked with the Nazis, that our underlining reasoning had something to do with the Jews ? What about Vichy France ? The Quisling Norway ? What about your own, American SS brigade, the George Washington brigade ?

I find your oversimplifications of the matters in this case, strongly disconcerting.

Narrated Abu Huraira:

Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.

Oh man GM, you have a way about you. You can twist and attenuate parts of a text so far out of context to suit your view on things, I almost see it fascinating. Almost.

For starters, Hadith are narrations concerning the deeds of the prophet Muhammad and are regarded by even the most traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as merely prisms through which better understanding the Qur'an, the socalled Qur'an exegesis. The texts were gathered and evaluated in bigger collections only in the 9th century and to this day are being investigated by even Muslims scholars of being authentic or not. Their semantic value, however, is unquestionable.

There are also different versions how Shia and Sunni muslims look at Hadith. Generally they both accept the authenticity of the majority of the Hadith, though they often disagree over the authenticity of certain hadith or how others might be interpreted, and have different canonical collections. Shi'as also believe that narrations of the Fourteen Infallibles, especially Ali bin Abi Talib, are valid as hadith, whereas Sunnis accept only narrations traceable to Muhammad.

What on earth are you trying to prove with this ? Islamic antipathy ? The worst, most hardocre „antipathy“ towards Jews was built, improved and perfected in Europe indicrectly because of the Catholic church. „They killed Jesus, they must suffer“. I am so tired of writing history lessons, but just for fun, lets do one more.

From the 9th century CE, the medieval Islamic world classified Jews (and Christians) as dhimmi, and allowed them to practice their religion more freely than they could do in medieval Christian Europe. Under Islamic rule, there was a Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain that lasted until at least the 11th century. It holds true though, that despite the Qur'an's prohibition, Jews were also forced to convert to Islam or face death in some parts of Yemen, Morocco and Baghdad several times between the 12th and 18th centuries. Faced with the choice of either death or conversion, many Jews and Christians emigrated. Some fled east to more tolerant Muslim lands.

During the Middle Ages in Europe some of the worst times for Jews transpired in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. A main justification of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. The persecution hit its first peak during the Crusades. In the First Crusade flourishing communities on the Rhine and the Danube were destroyed. In the Second Crusade the Jews in Germany were subject to several massacres. The Jews were also subjected to attacks by the Shepherds' Crusades. The Crusades were followed by expulsions, including, in 13.century, the banishing of all English Jews; in 14 century, the expulsion of 100,000 Jews in France; and in 15century, the expulsion of thousands from Austria. Many of the expelled Jews fled .

In medieval and Renaissance Europe, a major contributor to the deepening of antisemitic sentiment and legal action among the Christian populations was the popular preaching of the zealous reform religious orders, the Franciscans and Dominicans,, who combed European promoting antisemitism through their often fiery, emotional appeals.As the Black Death epidemics devastated Europe in the mid-14th century, annihilating more than half of the population, Jews were used as scapegoats. Rumors spread that they caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells. Hundreds of Jewish communities were destroyed.

So yeah lets judge Christianity by Exodus, Leviticus, Job and Revelations. Kill those that work on sabbath, sell your daughter as a slave, stone gays, beat slaves, even God negotiatiating with the devil just to prove a point ! A haaaaaa.

So yeah lets judge Christianity by Exodus, Leviticus, Job and Revelations. Kill those that work on sabbath, sell your daughter as a slave, stone gays, beat slaves, even God negotiatiating with the devil just to prove a point ! A haaaaaa.

A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?

"Ok, first of all. These things are far from solved and noted like you portray them to be. The only thing that is clear to someone who „knows the history“ is that it cant even be called history. What it is, is an open discussion panel on principal historic conceptions and facts based on scientific apparatus, that are inherent to historical studies. One sided interpretations of facts or sources of any kind that nudge the totality of context in your favor isnt exactly an objective debate, unless of course you want that ? Hmmm, where have I spoken of indoctrination before ??"

"Again, History means a very specific thing, we are loooong past the 19.century Rankean notion of „wie es eigentlich gewesen“ that history is a sequence of tools that search for what „actually“ transpired.

This a very Marxist linear traditionalistic perception of time, which makes me surprised, since a while ago you actually encouraged me NOT to read anything with the term Marx in it."

The concept of cause and effect and the linear nature of time well predates any marxist psuedo-science. I would note that you'd probably be in a good position to look at the horrors that marxism has inflicted and I'd think would want to reject anything tainted by it.

Second of all, I see you have adopted the Solway method of understanding what a nation is. OR you just dont read what I write. Ethnicity and nation have absolutely nothing in common and are in no shape or form connected as pre or post (if thats even a word) requisites. And I have no idea what the city of ancient Sumer, Umma has anything to do here ? Unless you mean the Ummah, collection of nation states. You oversimplify here, since ummah can be understood in several meanings. One is the context of the so called pan Arabism (connected to the arabic nationalism, that all arabs comprise a single nation, etc etc). Then we have the context of Islam :

The phrase Ummah Wahida in the Qur'an (the "One Community") refers to all of the Islamic world unified. The Quran says: “You [Muslims] are the best nation brought out for Mankind, commanding what is righteous (Ma'ruf, lit. "recognized [as good]") and forbidding what is wrong (Munkar, lit. "unrecognized [as good]")…” [3:110].

Gee, ya think maybe I was referring to a Sumerian city?

When the victorious western powers were carving up the Ottoman empire post WWI, they made nation-states of regions of the empire that were based not on the idea of states, but clan, tribe and religion. Thus we have places like Iraq where there are fault lines when national boundaries were made that did not reflect the populations within.

Let's look at the Kurds, (An actual identity that wasn't recently invented for propaganda purposes) who are unfortunate enough to be horribly oppressed, but not by Jews, thus their suffering and lack of a independent Kurdistan attract no international attention and outrage. Go to Turkey and Syria and tell them to create a Kurdish nation out of their territory. I'm sure Syria will get right on it after they finish crushing their "arab spring" with automatic weapons fire.

Yes, I was referring to the islamic concept of "Umma". Now go look up "dar al islam" and "dar al harb". You live in a continent labled "dar al harb" and they are working on making it into "dar al islam" so you have a personal stake in these concepts.

Allah's Apostle said, "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say. "O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him."

Note that the islamic antipathy towards jews long predates the existence of Israel.

Oh man GM, you have a way about you. You can twist and attenuate parts of a text so far out of context to suit your view on things, I almost see it fascinating. Almost.

Please explain what it really means then.

For starters, Hadith are narrations concerning the deeds of the prophet Muhammad and are regarded by even the most traditional Islamic schools of jurisprudence as merely prisms through which better understanding the Qur'an, the socalled Qur'an exegesis. The texts were gathered and evaluated in bigger collections only in the 9th century and to this day are being investigated by even Muslims scholars of being authentic or not. Their semantic value, however, is unquestionable.

No kidding. Now, do you know the importance of the ahadith I cited above to sunni muslims? Can you find for me a sunni scholar that has a nice, non-violent interpretation of the above hadith?

Muslim soldiers of the Waffen SS Hanjar Division reading from a German translation (or directly from the Arabic text) of a pamphlet written by ex-Mufti of Jerusalem Haj-Amin el-Husseini in 1943 entitled, “Islam und Judentum,” “Islam and the Jews.” (Photo from Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the Mufti , p. 311)

Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi made the following “observations” which recently aired on Palestinian Arab Al-Aqsa TV, September 12, 2008:

Studies conducted in Tel Aviv and in the Palestinian lands occupied by the Jews showed that they plant trees around their homes, because the Prophet Muhammad said that when the Muslims fight the Jews, each and every stone and tree will say: “Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” The only exception is the gharqad tree, which is one of the trees of the Jews, and if they hide behind it, it will not reveal their presence. According to reports of people who went there and saw it with their own eyes, many Jews plant gharqad trees around their homes, so that when the fighting begins, they can hide behind them. They are not man enough to stand and fight you.

While such hatemongering statements appear utterly bizarre to non-Muslims devoid of any understanding of Islam’s foundational texts, Al-Arifi’s inflammatory references to Jews have sacralized origins immediately apparent to Muslim audiences. The crux of Al-Arifi’s remarks, in fact, merely reiterate verbatim, a canonical hadith, specifically Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985, which is also featured prominently in the Hamas Covenant, article 7.

Briefly (go here for an in depth online discussion), what are the hadith, and which specific antisemitic motifs do they contain? Hadith, which means “story” (“narrative”), refers to any report of what the Muslim prophet Muhammad said or did, or his tacit assent to something said or done in his presence. (Hadith is also used as the technical term for the “science” of such “Traditions”). As a result of a lengthy process which continued for centuries after Muhammad’s death (in 632), the hadith emerged for Muslims as second in authority to the Koran itself. Sunna, which means “path” refers to a normative custom of Muhammad or of the early Islamic community. The hadith “justify and confirm” the Sunna. Henri Lammens, a seminal early 20th century scholar of Islam, highlighted the importance of the Sunna (and, by extension, the hadith):

As early as the first century A.H. [the 7th century] the following aphorism was pronounced: “The Sunna can dispense with the Koran but not the Koran with the Sunna”. Proceeding to still further lengths, some Muslims assert that “in controversial matters, the Sunna overrules the authority of the Koran, but not vice versa”…all admit the Sunna completes and explains it [the Koran].

The hadith compiled by al-Bukhari (d. 870) and Muslim b. al-Hajjaj (d. 875) are considered, respectively, to be the most important authoritative collections. The titles Sahih (“sound”) or Jami, indicating their comprehensiveness, signify the high esteem in which they are held.

Their comprehensive content includes information regarding religious duties, law and everyday practice (down to the most mundane, or intimate details), in addition to a considerable amount of biographical and other material. Four other compilations, called Sunan works, which indicates that they are limited to matters of religious and social practice, and law, also became authoritative. Abu Dawud (d. 888), al-Tirmidhi (d. 892), Ibn Maja (d. 896), and al-Nasi (d. 915) compiled these works. By the beginning of the 12th century, Ibn Maja’s collection became the last of these compilations of hadith to be recognized as “canonical.”

Before one can fully appreciate the major antisemitic themes in the hadith (summarized herein), it is critical to understand the antecedent Koranic motifs of Jew hatred which these hadith “complete and explain.” The Koran’s central antisemitic motif decrees an eternal curse upon the Jews (Koran 2:61/ reiterated at 3:112) for slaying the prophets and transgressing against the will of Allah. It should be noted that Koran 3:112 is featured just before the pre-amble to Hamas’ foundational Covenant. This central motif is coupled to Koranic verses 5:60, and 5:78, which describe the Jews transformation into apes and swine (5:60), or simply apes, (i.e. verses 2:65 and 7:166), having been “…cursed by the tongue of David, and Jesus, Mary’s son” (5:78). Muhammad himself repeats this Koranic curse in a canonical hadith (Sunan Abu Dawoud, Book 37, Number 4322), “He [Muhammad] then recited the verse [5:78]: ‘…curses were pronounced on those among the children of Israel who rejected Faith, by the tongue of David and of Jesus the son of Mary’ ”. And the related verse, 5:64, accuses the Jews—as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did in a January 2007 speech, citing Koran 5:64—of being “spreaders of war and corruption,” a sort of ancient Koranic antecedent of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The centrality of the Jews’ permanent “abasement and humiliation,” and being “laden with God’s anger” is clearly enunciated in the most authoritative Muslim exegetic literature on Koran 2:61/3:112, both ancient and contemporary. By nature deceitful and treacherous, the Jews rejected Allah’s signs and prophets, including Isa, the Muslim Jesus. Classical and modern Koranic commentators, when discussing Koran 5:82, which includes the statement (“Thou wilt surely find the most hostile of men to the believers are the Jews..” , also concur on the unique animus of the Jews towards the Muslims, which is repeatedly linked to the curse of Koran 2:61/3:112. For example, in his commentary on 5:82, the great Muslim historian and renowned Koranic exegete al-Tabari (d. 923) writes,

In my opinion, [the Christians] are not like the Jews who always scheme in order to murder the emissaries and the prophets, and who oppose God in his positive and negative commandments, and who corrupt His scripture which He revealed in His books.

Tabari’s classical interpretations of Koran 5:82 and 2:61, as well as his discussion of the related verse 9:29 mandating the Jews payment of the jizya (Koranic poll-tax), represent both Antisemitic and more general anti-dhimmi views that became, and remain, intrinsic to Islam to this day. Here is Tabari’s discussion of 2:61 and its relationship to verse 9:29, which emphasizes the purposely debasing nature of the Koranic poll tax:

…“abasement and poverty were imposed and laid down upon them”, as when someone says “the imam imposed the poll tax (jizya)on free non-Muslim subjects”, or “The man imposed land tax on his slave”, meaning thereby that he obliged him [to pay ] it, or, “The commander imposed a sortie on his troops”, meaning he made it their duty.…God commanded His believing servants not to give them [i.e., the non-Muslim people of the scripture] security—as long as they continued to disbelieve in Him and his Messenger—unless they paid the poll tax to them; God said: “Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth [Islam], being of those who have been given the Book [Bible]—until they pay the poll tax, being humble” (Koran 9:29)..

The dhimmis [non-Muslim tributary’s] posture during the collection of the jizya- “[should be lowering themselves] by walking on their hands, …reluctantly

… His words “and abasement and poverty were imposed upon them”, ‘These are the Jews of the Children of Israel’. ..‘Are they the Copts of Egypt?’…“What have the Copts of Egypt to do with this? No, by God, they are not; but they are the Jews, the Children of Israel.…By “and slain the prophets unrightfully” He means that they used to kill the Messengers of God without God’s leave, denying their messages and rejecting their prophethood.

Indeed the Koran’s overall discussion of the Jews is marked by a litany of their sins and punishments, as if part of a divine indictment, conviction, and punishment process. The Jews’ ultimate sin and punishment are made clear: they are the devil’s minions (4:60) cursed by Allah, their faces will be obliterated (4:47), and if they do not accept the true faith of Islam—the Jews who understand their faith become Muslims (3:113)—they will be made into apes (2:65/ 7:166), or apes and swine (5:60), and burn in the Hellfires (4:55, 5:29, 98:6, and 58:14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19). The Koranic curse (verses 2:61/3:112) upon the Jews for (primarily) rejecting, even slaying Allah’s prophets, including Isa/Jesus (or at least his “body double” 4:157-4:158), is updated with perfect archetypal logic in the canonical hadith: following the Muslims’ initial conquest of the Jewish farming oasis of Khaybar, one of the vanquished Jewesses reportedly served Muhammad poisoned mutton (or goat), which resulted, ultimately, in his protracted, agonizing death. And Ibn Saad’s sira (i.e., one of the earliest pious Muslim biographies of the Muslim prophet) account maintains that Muhammad’s poisoning resulted from a well-coordinated Jewish conspiracy.

George Vajda’s seminal 1937 analysis of the anti-Jewish motifs in the hadith remains the definitive work on this subject. Vajda concluded that according to the hadith stubborn malevolence is the Jews defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature: “…sorcery, poisoning, assassination held no scruples for them.” These archetypes sanction Muslim hatred towards the Jews, and the admonition to at best, “subject [the Jews] to Muslim domination,” as dhimmis, treated “with contempt,” under certain “humiliating arrangements.”

The annihilationist sentiments regarding Jews expressed by Saudi cleric Muhammad Al-Arifi, and incorporated permanently into the foundational 1988 Hamas Covenant, are also rooted in Islamic eschatology. As characterized in the hadith, Muslim eschatology highlights the Jews’ supreme hostility to Islam. Jews are described as adherents of the Dajjâl—the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ—or according to another tradition, the Dajjâl is himself Jewish. At his appearance, other traditions maintain that the Dajjâl will be accompanied by 70,000 Jews from Isfahan wrapped in their robes, and armed with polished sabers, their heads covered with a sort of veil. When the Dajjâl is defeated, his Jewish companions will be slaughtered— everything will deliver them up except for the so-called gharqad tree, as per the canonical hadith included in the 1988 Hamas Charter (article 7). Another hadith variant, which takes place in Jerusalem, has Isa (the Muslim Jesus) leading the Arabs in a rout of the Dajjâl and his company of 70,000 armed Jews. And the notion of jihad “ransom” extends even into Islamic eschatology—on the day of resurrection the vanquished Jews will be consigned to Hellfire, and this will expiate Muslims who have sinned, sparing them from this fate.

Professor Moshe Sharon recently provided a very lucid summary of the unique features of Shi’ite eschatology, Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s deep personal attachment to “mahdism,” and the key point of consistency between Shi’a and Sunni understandings of this doctrine—which emphasizes Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985—noting:

both Shi’ites and Sunnis share one particular detail about “the coming of the hour” and the dawning of messianic times: The Jews must all suffer a violent death, to the last one. Both Shi’ites and Sunnis quote the famous hadith [Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985] attributed to Muhammad…

Professor Sharon further observes,

Not one Friday passes without this hadith being quoted in sermons from one side of the Islamic world to the other.

The rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude. As historian Bat Ye’or has explained,

…because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery [pace Koran 17:4-5/ 7:168; and 2:61/3:112], the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.

This is exactly the Islamic context in which the widespread, “resurgent” use of Jew annihilationist apocalyptic motifs, would be an anticipated, even commonplace occurrence. And for more than six decades, promoters of modern jihad genocide have consistently invoked Islam’s Jew-exterminating eschatology. Hajj Amin el-Husseini, ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, and Muslim jihadist, who became, additionally, a full-fledged Nazi collaborator and ideologue in his endeavors to abort a Jewish homeland, and destroy world Jewry, composed a 1943 recruitment pamphlet (see Jennie Lebel’s 2007 biography of the Mufti , pp. 311-319) for Balkan Muslims entitled, “Islam and the Jews.” This incendiary document hinged upon antisemitic motifs from the Koran (for example, 5:82), and the hadith (including Muhammad’s alleged poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess), and concluded with the apocalyptic canonical hadith describing the Jews’ annihilation.

Forty-five years later the same hadith was incorporated into the 1988 Hamas Covenant, making clear the jihad terrorist organization had its own aspirations for Jew annihilation. Sheer ignorance of this history and theology are pathognomonic of much larger and more dangerous phenomena: the often willful, craven failure to examine and understand the living legacy of Islam’s foundational anti-Jewish animus, or acknowledge the depth of Jew hatred that pervades contemporary Islam’s clerical leadership, including within major Muslim communities of the United States.

For example, Fawaz Damra, the former Imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, was touted as a promoter of interfaith dialogue even after evidence of his participation in fundraising events for the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), was produced, along with a videotape of the Imam telling a crowd of Muslim supporters in 1991 that they should aim “…a rifle at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation, and that is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews.” Convicted in 2004 for lying to immigration officials about his links to the PIJ, Damra, who was born in Nablus in 1961, was subsequently deported back to the West Bank in January 2007. And last October 30, 2007 it was announced that Imam Ahmed Alzaree—the first permanent successor to Damra—resigned as the new “spiritual leader” of the Islamic Center of Cleveland three days prior to officially beginning the job. Alzaree, who at one stage of the vetting process expressed the unusual reservation that “he would not come to Cleveland because a reporter was inquiring about his background,” ostensibly accepted the position as noted on October 26, 2007, then pre-emptively resigned a few days later, after the contents of two “khutbahs” (sermons) he had delivered on March 7, 2003, were revealed. Alzaree concluded the second sermon with the same apocalyptic canonical hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 41, Number 6985)—repeated in the 1988 Hamas Covenant.

Recently, the combined efforts of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and Rabbi Aron Hier of The Simon Wiesenthal Center, focused attention on the hadith collections—specifically Sahih Muslim Book 041, Numbers 6981 to 6985—posted at a website run by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at the University of Southern California (USC). USC Provost, C. L. Max Nikias, first learned of these hadith when Rabbi Aron Hier approached USC trustee Alan Casden. Hier expressed his concerns over the five hadith advocating the Jews’ annihilation by Muslims to hasten the coming of the “final hour.” Upon reviewing these contents, Nikias declared that “the passage cited is truly despicable…The passage in the Hadith that you brought to our attention violates the USC Principles of Community, and it has no place on a USC website.” Nikias’ letter of August 11, 2008 (which can be viewed here) also stated, “I have ordered that the passage be removed.”

The USC-MSA—in grudging compliance—removed, but refused to condemn these living, sacralized invocations to genocidal violence. Moreover, another Muslim student organization at USC the Muslim Student Union also failed to repudiate the contents of these hadith, and declared it was “outraged” at the university’s “unprecedented and unconscionable” censorship. David Horowitz responded aptly to this statement by noting that the hadith which were removed from the USC website, “…may be part of the religious canon, but that doesn’t make them less hateful.” Horowitz’s sober reflection recalls the lament of the late Dr. John Garang, who lead the Southern Sudanese Christian and Animist populations in their fight against the genocidal jihad campaign’s of the Arab Khartoum north during the 1990s. Garang left us with this critical question in 1999, which, almost beyond belief, remains largely ignored, and for certain, unresolved in the appropriate manner:

Is the call for jihad against a particular people a religious right by those calling for it, or is it a human rights violation against the people upon whom jihad is declared and waged?

Almost 850 years ago, elaborating on the depth of Muslim hatred for the Jews in his era, Maimonides (in ~ 1172 C.E.) made this profound observation regarding the Jewish predilection for denial, a feature that he insists will hasten their destruction.

We have acquiesced, both old and young, to inure ourselves to humiliation…All this notwithstanding, we do not escape this continued maltreatment [by Muslims] which well nigh crushes us. No matter how much we suffer and elect to remain at peace with them, they stir up strife and sedition.

The Jews and their communal leaders like Maimonides living under Islamic rule in the Middle Ages—vanquished by jihad, isolated, and well-nigh defenseless under the repressive system of dhimmitude—can be excused for their submissive denial. There is no such excuse in our era given the existence of an autonomous Jewish State of Israel, and a thriving Western Jewish diaspora, particularly here in the United States, living under the blanket of hard won protections for their religious freedom, physical security, and dignity.

As a pre-condition to real dialogue—not its miserable simulacrum—Jews and their leadership—religious, political, and intellectual—must demand from their Muslim counterparts acknowledgment and wrenching reform of the sacralized Islamic Jew hatred which is still being taught and promoted in Islamic schools, religious institutions, and even on US university campuses. Speaking as a Jew, let us demonstrate as Jews that we are no longer content living with Maimonides’ 12th century expectations of Muslims, otherwise they will oblige us.

In the aftermath of the Bar Cochba Revolt, the Romans excluded Jews from a large area around Aelia Capitolina, which Gentiles only inhabited. The province now hosted two legions and many auxiliary units, two colonies, and--to complete the disassociation with Judaea--a new name, Syria Palaestina. The center of Jewish settlement moved northward to Galilee and Gaulanitis The number of Jewish communities elsewhere declined, and many once-Jewish towns became Gentile or received large numbers of Gentile inhabitants. They lost their old Jewish names to new Roman names; eg, Sepphoris became Diocaesarea, Lydda Diospolis, and Beth Guvrin Eleutheropolis. Sebaste became a colony, like Caesarea and Aelia Capitolina. The ban on circumcision remained in effect until Antoninus Pius--probably recognizing its dangerously provocative effect--revoked it.

After 135 the Jews no longer had political, urban, or territorial institutions that could support another revolt, but they managed to maintain national identity as a result of the growth of rabbinical institutions and the patriarchate in the Galilee (see People and Places). Nor did the radical Messianism of earlier periods revive until the third century, when empire-wide economic crisis left the Jews too weak to mount any organized resistance. The rabbinic sources vividly reflect the poverty of the people in the troubled third century because of rampant inflation and the collapse of the money economy, famine and plague, and crime.

Syria Palaestina thus became a good deal less problematic for the imperial government than Judaea had been. The government continued to permit the Jews certain religious freedoms, such as exemption from the imperial cult, and gradually the Roman governors permitted the Jews to recover certain of their communal rights, such as local courts and internal government, under the overall authority of the patriarch in Tiberias. The Samaritans fared less well, as the Romans took steps to prevent a resurgence of Samaritan nationalism by founding a pagan temple on Mt Gerizim, just south of Neapolis, and refused to make concessions to Samaritan religious practices.

AB said: "In the Modern era, apart from a few natural disasters, the only reason for Jews immigrating (emmigrating?) from "Arab countries“ is because of the Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquisition and immigration. Settler numbers prior to that are marginal, compared to the Aliyah migrations from Europe."

I'm not sure I understand here. Concerning "Ottoman restrictions on Zionist land acquistion": Wouldn't it be more accurate here to say "Jewish" than to say "Zionist"? Did the Ottoman Empire allow Jews who were not Zionists to acquire land? I find that doubtful. What then is the point/purpose for saying "Zionist" instead of saying "Jewish"? Is it to avoid having to acknowledge an example of the oppressive nature of dhimmitude throughout much/most/all the Ottoman Empire especially in the Arab regions?

Anyway, the point is tangential to the one that I was seeking to make: That upon the creation of the Jewish State of Israel by the United Nations there was massive Jewish emmigration from the oppressive nature of dhimmitude in Arab lands to Israel and that the numbers involved rival the numbers coming from Europe. I apologize for not being the scholar that you are in these matters Andrew and so lack citations, but my intended underlying point is to undercut the assertion sometimes made that Israel's creation is due simply to Europe dumping its Jews on the Arabs.

AB said "About the killings, and terror attacks etc. I post this table from 2008, about the „effectiveness“ of the Palestinian war machine

Although wikipedia is adequate for many kinds of citations, for others, particularly controversial issues such as the one we are discussing here, IMHO it is less than definitive. Just as we have cited in this thread how youtube is systematically removing material supportive of the Israel and Jews (due to intimidation?) given what I understand to be the nature of how Wikipedia works, it seems to me that the same forces can be at work. As one of GM's posts point out (accurately and fairly in my opinion) there are widely believed falsehoods against Israel out there about many things and and I am not ready to grant the accuracy of numbers skewed as heavily as these are. Indeed in one of your citations, the ratio is more like 3-1 instead of the numbers here.

That said, I agree that more Palestinians have been killed by the IDF than Israelis have been killed by Palestinians, a datum which is cited by some as an indication of , , , I'm not sure what-- moral virtue (!) on the part of the Palestinians? The logic eludes me. Does Israel have to wait for the efficacy of rockets launched from Gaza and suicidal kills to rise to higher death levels before acting to abate these attacks from an entity led by a democratically elected group (Hamas) formally dedicated to the destruction of Israel? Does not Israel have a right of self-defense?!?

I said: "Yet despite all their genocidal attacks on the Jews, good people such as yourself do not hold the Palestinians to blame for the natural consequences of their actions. Indeed you speak of the Jews surrounding the Arabs/Palestinians!?!

AB responded: "I will not comment on the video links, I do not consider this type of argumenting viable for such a seriously delicate topic. Likewise I can return the favor with the link to the Massada2000 website and the s.h.i.t. list, and give you a counter argument for the frightenly imbecilic zionistic groups, but where would that lead us ?"

I have heard of Zionist groups that Israeli friends tell me go too far, but they are stuff of the internet, not on official state TV of Israel as the Palestian clips I posted are on official West Bank TV-- so my reponse is that the comparison you seek to make is not valid.

Then there is the matter of "Who started it?" If we were to look at WW2 post D-day, the Allies certainly were imposing more casualties than they were receiving-- yet no one (I hope!) would use that datum to suggest that they were the aggressors (Russia excepted!!!)

The starting point needs to be that the the Arabs Surrounding Israel (hereinafter ASIs be they Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, West Bankers, Gazans, Egyptians) have sought to wipe out Israel-- which was created by the United Nations. Israel has defended itself-- righteously and effectively. THAT IS A GOOD THING. As is the case when aggressors lose wars, they sometimes lose land from which they launched their attacks. Those who accepted Israel's right to exist (Egypt) got their land back. Those who persisted in trying to wipe out Israel didn't. After years of murderous, indeed evil deliberate targeting of Jewish women and children, yes some Jewish groups have concluded that peace is not possible and that efforts at peace will be met with taquiya in preparation for the day when pretenses can be dropped and so hard-core, hard-line thought can be found, though the overwhelming majority of Israelis would be delighted to have genuine partners in peace.

AB said "You saw them purely as terrorists, I posted that, as a balance check to the other side, whereas in reality my personal opinions on the whole matter are very mixed, and quite frankly, not appropriate for this portion of the forum."

Well, that certainly is an intriguing dangle! And as the host here, I give you the green light to say what your personal feelings are.

AB said "I'm writing my ass off here, thinking and argumenting my point, but for you linking articles and sources that support your view on things is a self suficient argument in a debate.Actually I would rather call shoving other peoples opinions down your collegues throats, indoctrination."

Well, you are not the first person around here to have commented on GM's propensity to post articles without personal commentary of his own! Indeed, on occasion I have been amongst those so commenting That said, I can also see the point of not wanting to get in the way of the expression of a journalist or writer who addresses the questions raised in an authoritative manner and in the case at hand here I think the articles GM cites are quite on point and well-reasoned; indeed I invite you to address the points they make or to share quality pieces which do address the points in question.

I'd also like to remind all of us (ahem GM, AB, and , , , um , , , me ) that this is by its nature a subject subjected to intense emotions and that in some cases we come from different cultures which may or may not have subtly different understandings as to what constitutes good manners in communication. Let us avoid making snarky comments please and let us avoid getting irked by snarky comments. We have the raw material here for some really good conversation which can help each and everyone of us move forward in our understandings.

Concerning the discussion of Solway, from my point of view (and perhaps in search of simplicity I achieve merely the simplistic) about Palestine/Palestinians etc. I confess that on a certain level the significance of what I perceive to be the essence of AB's point eludes me; it seems to me on a par with arguing that the UN should have created not one but two Israels, one for Ashkenazi Jews and one for Sephardic. Certainly, as GM points out, the Kurds have a far stronger claim to deserving a separate nation (instead of being divided amongst Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran) than the particular subset of Arabs currently residing in the West Bank (thanks to AB's interesting commentary I am no longer sure whether I should be calling them Palestinians or not ) but there does not seem to be much interest in that , , ,

AB wrote: "When reading about Hitler and his ideology and propaganda et al. You have to be very careful, since he is an epitome of „picking what you like from all around and stuff it into one big neat pile of WTF“. At one point in his „career“ he became obsessed with finding the pure race, and traveled almost off world to find his agenda. From aryans in Iran to Tibet. Now as some may know he was obsessed with Nietzsche, although he read it in a completely oppurtunistic manner. Nietzche on the other hand had a thing (to put it bluntly ) for Zoroaster/Zarathustra the prophet. Through this prism he started to plow around Iran to find the „aryan“ he read so largely about in Zoroaster texts, sadly little did he know that this „aryan“ meant something totally other to what his version of „aryan“ was all about. The reason why alot of Iranians/Persians got excited about the book was, since it was promoted as a book that promotes the domination of the aryan race, the aryan ideology. Needless to say, the aryan race in that or any other context doesnt exist, and what they read about, and were so excited about was not their Aryan, but that of the NSDAP."

I'm not clear on the point here. Perhaps GM and I are misled by propaganda. In my case I have come into this conversation with the understanding that the analysis offered by GM's article is correct. Are you saying that the government of Persia, which coincidentally was in bed at the time with the Nazis, changed its name to Iran for reasons not having to do with the Aryan racial theories of Hitler? If so, what were those reasons?

AB said to GM "I find your oversimplifications of the matters in this case, strongly disconcerting."

I confess to having a similar line of thought, though GM beat me to expressing it The explanation of our oversimplications may be rather , , , simple. We are Americans and we are working with what we know! Certainly we would be in over our heads concerning the history of the various regions/republics/countries of what used to by Yugoslavia (oddly enough, I know a little bit due to a US legal decision about whether to grant political asylum to one "Artukovic" in the aftermath of WW2 due to his actions in Serbo-Croatia) but given the vicious Jew hatred of Iran's current regime (including its determination to completely wipe Israel out) and the connections of its prior government with the Nazis, it seems to me that it was not a strange leap of logic to infer Jew hatred from Iranian participation in the Waffen SS.

Next: As I Jew of course I am quite aware of vast stretches of terrible Christian behavior towards Jews. Indeed it was not until I was 8 years old that the Pope forgave me for killing Christ. As a somewhat educated man I am aware of a historical period many centuries ago wherein Jews were treated decently in parts of the Muslim world, certainly far better than we were treated in the Christian world. But what interests me in the world today is the reality of the world today. In most of the Christian world as a Jew I am safe (questionable: Russia, parts of eastern Europe, and increasingly the rest of Europe-- but is Europe really Christian or Secular Humanist now? , , , but I digress). Certainly, the issue is quite different in the Arab world!!! I certainly hope I do not need to expound further on this point!!!

Which brings me back to the starting point-- your idea that the "Palestians"/Arabs surrounding Israel are surrounded by the Jews (!) (who, if they were wise would allow them a way out,?) instead of the other way around. To the north is Hezbollah, armed by Iran (led by a man dedicated to the erradication of Israel) with some 50,000 plus rockets that cover a large % of Israel, to the northeast is Syria, which more than once in my lifetime has sought to invade and obliterate Israel but now is surprised that Israel holds and is reluctant to give back the Golan Heights before Syria recognizes Israel's right to exist, to the east is the West Bank, a land abandoned by Jordan rather than continue to deal with Arafat and the PLO and a land which continues to violate its promises in the Oslo Accords to recognize Israel's right to exist (yet its school books and military emblems continue to show "from river to sea") and to its south-west is Gaza, headed by democractically elected Hamas which is dedicated to the erradication of Israel. Then there is Egypt, which got Sinai back after recognizing Israel-- though the durability of that peace is now in deep question.

AB, does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel have a right to self-defense?

I too was given pause when Israeli v. Palestinian casualty rates were mentioned. Hamas, Fatah, et al practice asymmetric warfare, embed their fighting position among population centers, have well documented habits of producing very slanted media material, and have intimidated journalists to the point only stringers sympathetic to the Palestinian cause can operate in Palestinian areas. Hamas and Fatah work very hard to produce the casualties they then parade before the cameras, and yet you cite that as reason to indict Israel? Cognitive dissonance ensues.

If Palestinian apologists held Egypt and Jordan--who have harshly dealt with their Palestinian citizens--to the same standard as they do Israel, if they noted Palestinian citizens within Israel are some of the freest, most engaged in the economy non-oliogarchic Arabs in the region, and if indeed apologist could acknowledge that most the complaints they cite would evaporate if Palestinians stopped lobbing rockets and suicide bombers at Israeli citizens, then perhaps some progress as could be made. As it stands, pathologies embraced as a military tactic that then get cited as reason to indict Israel create a circular mishmash from which no winning hand can emerge on any side, at least for those who don't believe the body count is indeed the winning hand.

A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?

Or is it the other way around?

Ok, guro Crafty said above that this is not an echo chamber, that we seek truth ? In my whole life I have maybe seen one or two cases of such virulent one sided stubornness. Man even my college kids can be brought to senses easier.

Violence from muslims globally vs violence from christians you say. The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for countless deaths. Even so, Muslims will never associate this with the teachings of Jesus, peace be on him.

Saint Augustine’s cognite intrare (“force them to convert”). In fact the Qur’an says the exact opposite: There is no compulsion in religion ( 2:256 ). Augustine had a frightening idea that all must be compelled to subdue to the true Christian faith.Hundreds of thousands were tortured and slaughtered in the name of Christianity during the periods of the Arian, Donatist and Albigensian heresies

Still, Augustine remains one of the key figures in understanding the philosophy of the Christian theologic tradition. Hows that for an irony.

Thomas Aquinas, another key figure in Christian theology, has even perfected the concept of Just War.

Then lets see, the Crusades. 10 of them including the Northern ones. The European armies were saying, as they slaughtered both Christian and Muslim Arabs: “Kill them all, God will know his own.”

Europe's Reformation and Counter Reformation Era. TWO THIRDS of the European Chrstian population was slaughtered in this era.

The African slave trade, that claimed the life of approx. 9 million souls.

Colonial conquest. Estimates for the number of Native Americans slaughtered by the Europeans in North, Central and South America run as high as 20 million within three generations.

In the 20th century alone

Western and/or Christian powers have been responsible for at least twenty times more deaths than Muslim powers. In this most brutal of centuries, we created incomparably more civilian casualties than have Muslims in the whole of Islamic history.

a) In the 20th century, Rwanda, 1994. Witness the slaughter of 900,000 Rwandan in a population that was over 90 % Christian. Reports indicate the percentage of Muslims in Rwanda has doubled since the genocide due to Muslim sheltering and protection of Tutsis and to Hutus' during the genocide. Read up on Emily Wax' "Islam Attracting Many Survivors of Rwanda Genocide“.

b) 1992-1995 Bosnia. The genocide of over 300,000 Muslims and systematic rape of over 100,000 Muslim women by Christian orthodox Serbs

Add the numbers of ONLY those two incidents and try to compare them with the toll of muslim extremism in 20th and 21th century.

All I want when I write this mega essays is that you would catch a GLIMPSE of the other side, that maybe, just maybe what you think is so engrained in your brain, of which you are so sure that it is 100% undoubtedly true, DOES have a different point to it. This is what I mean by objective. There are no objective research in and of themselves, since any analysis is already a filtering of the author. What IS an objective analysis is reading (from your part) all the different points and opinions that constitute a problem, making a constelation of facts and concepts, so you can grasp the totality and fullness of the subject at hand. Otherwise you are just a saloon thinker know it all who sings his versions to ears that want to hear them.

It's good that you've started reading up on islamic theology. If you actually develop a good grasp of it, you'll find that all the politically correct slogans you've made about it are utterly bogus.

What I meant with research is, I actually go and read your articles and research the authors backgrounds and dig up my uni work and research while answering. Like stated a while ago in the Fascism thread, one of my main areas of research is history of South Eastern Europe (Balkans) and philosophy of religion. I consider myself an Annales school Marxist through and through. I will get to that in a bit.

And what you would discover, after reading actual scholars that focus their lifes research around this topic, not random bloggers and journalists ala Solway and Bostom (who is BTW an Associate professor of Medicine) is that there is NO SUCH THING as politically correct slogans in ancient texts, because they need to be treated historically, otherwise they are just another anacrhonism used as a political tool. What you would also discover is that it is a continuous dialogue between the past and the present that filters and recycles the problematic, constantly sharpening the ordeal and finding new dilemmas.

In no particular order here are a few from all kinds of different winds, so you wont ask for Objective stuff anymore :

This is just a few I consider a must study to get a short outline to the whole problematic spectrum, before even contemplating anything in more depth. Havent even included most of the bigger modern players, since most of their work cannot be understood without understanding the basic classic woodwork.

To all interested parties, here is a rather long-ish article by Patricia Crone, that speaks of the historical problematic of understandind classic terms with modern eyes. An actual professor for Islamic studies from Princeton about the history and the origin of the term Jihad. Highly recommended for anyone who doesnt wear ideology glasses with too much pride :

The concept of cause and effect and the linear nature of time well predates any marxist psuedo-science. I would note that you'd probably be in a good position to look at the horrors that marxism has inflicted and I'd think would want to reject anything tainted by it.

Oh man what can I say here ? Marxist pseudo-science, linear nature of time...cmon, GM. You arent talking to a saloon ear that wants to be fed. I really do not wish to spoil this off topic, but such spam riles me up.

First of all, the main building block of what you call pseudo-science is Marx and Engels materialistic INTERPRETATION of history. Last I checked neither of those two have anything to do wtih science. What they do have to do with is a scientific METHOD. What linear nature of time here means, of course, is not cause and effect, but rather simply put, that things move solidly in a specific direction without derailing, being fueled by a deus ex machina, in marxist sense, the class struggle.

And second of all, the horrors of Marxism here werent really horrors at all, and most certainly they werent Marxists horrors. I beleive you refer to Yugoslavia. All recent studies and polls show that a vast majority of people said life back then was a lot more lax, less stresfull, happier and freer. Almost 0% crime rate, no unemployment, free health care with one of the best surgeons and doctors in central europe, a solid school system, sure work after graduation, economical vertical mobility, great national spirit and cameradery...I am not going to deny the facts here though, there were problems, and holes, and everything. But like there arent any now ? There are, alongside most of the positive facts said above, gone, and ¾ of the state of ex Yugoslavia set in turmoil and thrown 60 years in the past due to nationalist agendas and psychotic delusionists.

Yugoslavia was not Communist, but very openly socialist with the ideology that was INFLUENCED by Marx and subsequent thinkers. Feudalism, socialism, communism etc. are merely socio-economic formations, modules that have their place in Marxist thought. Comunism by far does not equate Marxism. What everyone tends to forget or fail to look up is that dialectial materialism, the most important drive behind the communist craze in 19.and 20. century, wasnt even Marx' work but Engels and Lenins adaptation of it, with some Hegels dialectics and Feuerbach materialism. At the split of the french party into reformist and revolutionary Marx himself wrote to Lafrague : "if that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist".

About the Hadith comments, I strongly advise you to read some of Patricia Crones opus. It will most definitely do you good.

@Guro Crafty

I have just noticed your post when I finished writing this, and thank you for some of the more articulated opinions, which I will sadly need to adress another time, as writing this in the last few days has put me in some SERIOUS behind time at work.

I will write this short response though, to tackle what I feel is the general vibe of your post. As much as I hate writing this but as a historian and philosopher, my task is not to give answers, to offer solutions. This very well might be the task of something else, politics, religion, warfare, science, I dont know. My task here is to RIGHTFULLY articulate the problem, so that the solution will be as most thorough as possible. And a huge part of this rightfull articulation is to problematise, open discussions, polemics, different builds, different views etc. because most frequently, the way we structure and view the problem, is part of the problem itself.

So in short I cannot honestly answer you to the question : does Israel have a right to exist? Does Israel have a right to self-defense? I mean of course from the basic context, there is no doubt that it does, but my pitch is, that the problem is WAY more layered and structured than this basic question.

The additional problem, like I said earlier, is that everything is colored and smudged by political rhetoric and different agendas, which makes an already difficult task of discovering national identities, ethnogenesis, ethnonyms origins, etc. impossible. I mean even with a tiny, insignificnat country such as Slovenia, there are hefty, fiery discussions about our past, that cannot be forgot, and to this day form the basis of political dialogue when warming up for the voters base. Who was pro who was contra. At one point it constantly divides the nation and makes tension, on the other hand it completely halts any type of cultural progress.Very sad.

But in such an extreme case as we talk about now, with so much blood spilled and revenges taken, I fear that this is slowly becoming symptomatic.

A more accurate evaluation would be to compare the violence from muslims globally vs. the violence from christians. You see many honor killings in the Bible Belt? I know the Baptists are famous for suicide bombings. Everyone has of course seen where Lutherans flew planes into the WTC. Remember when Catholics butchered those kids in Beslan? So why are so many horrific acts done by those motivated by christian theology and so few by muslim theology?

Or is it the other way around?

Ok, guro Crafty said above that this is not an echo chamber, that we seek truth ? In my whole life I have maybe seen one or two cases of such virulent one sided stubornness. Man even my college kids can be brought to senses easier. I assume this is because you make some sort of coherent argument to the college kids. You have yet to do so here.

Violence from muslims globally vs violence from christians you say. The horrible truth is that, numerically and statistically speaking, Christian Civilization is the bloodiest and most violent of all civilizations in all of history, and is responsible for countless deaths. Even so, Muslims will never associate this with the teachings of Jesus, peace be on him.

I think if you look at the numbers, marxism in it's various forms has the record for deaths, but muslims at the grassroots level do their best to try to move up the list.